Talking about the Publishing Technology of Plate Making

1. Academic Writing Status and Development Trends
Academic rapid progress and development have been the pillars of the publishing house in the past and can no longer be expected. Textbooks for universities are also declining due to the tendency of children to read books. Academic specialization, segmentation, and interdisciplinary development have led to a reduction in the number of readers set. There are fewer and fewer prints for each publication.

The reduction in the volume of publications is related to the increase in pricing. We are looking forward to maintaining the low price by increasing the profit from printing. At present, it is impossible to increase the output due to the issue of fatigue. As a result, the upswing of academic books and the suppression of purchases have created a vicious circle.

In book production, the proportion of the costs of group printing, plate making, and plate printing is increasing due to the decrease in the number of prints. The countermeasures are very scrutinized, and the tendency of high fixed fee ratio is difficult to avoid even if technological innovation is adopted. . The frequent use of computers in the production of academic books is not unrelated to the original price reduction.

As a feature of academic books, it is not possible to require too much print first, and most of them are hard-to-edit books.
Most of the production facilities are prepared for printing large-scale, colorized, and varied publications. At any stage of prepress, press, or postpress, there is a big problem that is inconsistent with the function of the production equipment. Although the four-color offset printing press has been widely used, it is totally unsuitable for printing academic books. As far as the prepress stage is concerned, a simple grouping operation can be successfully completed using a computer group edition. However, because the cost is already quite low, it cannot Too much hope to reduce costs.

For high-cost, multi-text version (such as classical books) is difficult to deal with, but the formula and form more than the group, because the current version of the technology is not high, despite paying more editing, proofreading energy, also It is difficult to meet the quality requirements of the group edition.

In addition, for publications that are not destined for print, the ratio of the cost of the composite printing to the cost of platemaking will inevitably increase.

For large-scale print publications, because of the concentration of equipment investment in India and India, the academic books that are not destined to print are certainly mismatched, but its proportion in costs is relatively small. .

The pre-press part that is particularly important can be roughly divided into group editions, plans (photos), plate making, printing, and so on.

2. Production Technology Trends (1)

The main typewriters in the past have almost been completely eliminated and replaced by a computerized version. Although the early photocopying system is still applicable and has low reliability, it is increasingly used because of the high cost of equipment.

What is most noticeable now is the desktop publishing system (DTP, Desk Top Publishing). Compared with the original photocopying system, the equipment cost of the former is much lower. Therefore, how to replace the old equipment must be taken seriously when formulating a new plan. the study. Nowadays, most Macintosh computers have been used on the platform, thus increasing the tendency to move to the Windows series, which accounts for 90% of computers.

The DTP still has two major problems: the type of text, the typeface, and the rule of composition. The various types of fonts it provides can basically meet the requirements. The type of text refers to the number of characters and their restrictions. The font usually refers to the number of strokes and stroke direction of each character. DTP is essentially open, and its premise is the interchangeability between computers. It uses a common code number to specify text and is used by various types of computers. Other texts cannot be exchanged in principle.

Although the original photocopying system also uses a computer, the system is closed (closed) and generally used only in the same company, so the text used is of course used after each time it is made.

There are of course a limited number of texts. The "JIS X 0208-1997 7-bit (bit) and 8 (bit) 2-byte symbolized Chinese character set for information exchange" set 20 years ago is divided into the first set and the second set of two sets of standards. There are 6355 Chinese character codes. The first standard was 1978, the second standard was 1983, the third standard was 1990, and the fourth standard was published in 1997.

The standard was originally formulated for the internal processing of government and enterprises. Therefore, it focuses on the use of Chinese characters for place names and names used mainly for administration and office work. Some people criticized that although it is sufficient to measure the use of office, it is obviously not enough to cover the number of scripts needed for general publications.
When the standard was first established

(1978) Computers are far from as popular as they are now, so the publishing industry's disregard for the standard does not pose any problems. Since 1969, the publishing industry has adopted a photocopying system that has been operated, and its memory is freely available.

The publishing industry adopts the fonts of common Chinese characters, while the off-character Chinese characters always use the font of "Kangxi Dictionary" as the positive characters. The out-of-table Chinese font of this common Chinese character is not included in the JIS code.

At this point, the tendency of the DTP to make a text version suddenly appeared. The input, edit (group edition), and output are performed separately by each unit. Since the data has been exchanged by the JIS code, if the word type or font other than the JIS code is used, the data cannot be easily made even if the data is made. The object of the exchange.

Supplementary standards for JIS are being planned. The third and fourth sets of programs for about 5,000 Chinese characters are also under intensive research. It is expected that standards will be worked out by the end of this year. If it is actually installed in various computers, it can solve problems to a considerable degree. (For details, see the fifth edition of the Colloquium of the 5th "China-Japan Publishing Education Academic Exchange Conference" in 1997). (to be continued)