The Non-Designer's Scan and Print Book: All You Need to Know About Production and Prepress to Get Great-Looking Pages - Softcover

The Non-Designer's Scan and Print Book (Non-Designer's Series) is an excellent guide for beginners who want to learn the essentials of scanning images and printing professional-looking publications. Authors Robin Williams and Sandee Cohen are two well-known desktop publishing (DTP) experts who have written a number of acclaimed computer-graphics books, and here they do an outstanding job of distilling the core elements of scanning, manipulating, and outputting images from high-tech, esoteric details.

Williams and Cohen commence their tour of scanning and printing by explaining how to plan your project. They begin by encouraging you to choose your paper, colors, graphics, binding, number of folds and copies, and printing methods. Then they introduce you to basic DTP and business issues like resolution, paper size, print area, cost of goods, fonts, and PostScript. Their highly rudimentary approach even includes a discussion of the type of printing device necessary to complete your project and whether you will need to use an inkjet, laser, dye-sublimation, or thermal wax printer. From there, they look to the essentials of commercial printing, finding a print shop, working within a budget, and using processes such as letterpress, flexography, and gravure.

Subsequent chapters delve into computer issues like software applications commonly used for DTP projects and how they handle color modes, raster images, resolution, vector images, and file formats. You also tackle color issues such as process color printing, using spot colors and duotones, and specifying the number of colors in a publication.

Image acquisition plays a big role in completing any project, and the authors provide helpful tips for using scanners, digital cameras, Kodak Photo CD-ROMs, stock photography, and clip art. Finally, you study printer topics such as using high-res output, working with service bureaus, determining output specs such as client and delivery information, writing film specs, using printer's marks, understanding resolution and linescreen issues, trapping, and proofing your job. There's also a preflight checklist to help you determine whether you've thought everything through. At the end of the book, you get quizzes or projects for most of the chapters as well as a list of resources for more information. --David Wall

Sandee Cohen, a former advertising creative supervisor, has been teaching and training on the Macintosh for the past seven years. She teaches at the New School for Social Research Computer Instruction Center in New York City. She is also a contributing writer for several desktop publishing magazines. Her artwork has been used for book jacket covers, interior illustrations, maps, and technical illustrations.

Robin Williams is a fourth-generation Californian on both sides, born in Berkeley and raised in the Bay Area. She lived in Sonoma County for 15 years, then in 1993, she packed up her kids, the dog, and two cats and moved to New Mexico.