The hottest prospects for the plate making technol

Looking forward to the plate making technology of the publishing industry in the 21st century

1. The current situation of academic works and the trend of their production technology

the rapid progress and development of academia used to be the pillar of publishing houses, and now it can no longer be expected. Textbooks for universities are also declining due to the juvenile tendency of reading materials. Academic specialization, subdivision and the development of interdisciplinary have led to the reduction of set readers. The printing volume of each publication is getting smaller and smaller

the decrease in print volume of publications is related to the rise in pricing. It is expected to maintain a low price by increasing the profits from printing volume. At present, it is impossible to increase printing volume due to issuance fatigue. Therefore, the high price of academic books and the inhibition of purchase have formed a vicious circle

in book production, due to the reduction of the number of prints, the proportion of the costs of plate assembly, plate making, plate printing and other costs in the pricing is increasing day by day. The solution is quite deliberate, and the tendency of high fixed fee ratio is inevitable even if technological innovation is adopted. The frequent use of computers in the production technology of academic books has something to do with the fact that the original price cannot be reduced

as a feature of academic books, first of all, we should not require too much printing, and most of them are difficult to form editions in terms of their content

most of the production equipment is available for printing publications with large printing volume, color and different styles. At any stage of prepress, press and post press, there is a big problem that is inconsistent with the function of the production equipment. Although the four-color offset press has been widely used, it is not suitable for printing academic books at all. In terms of the prepress stage, the simple edition assembly operation can be successfully completed by using the computer. However, just because the cost is already quite cheap, we can't expect it to be reduced to 5. Press the upper collet down by 15 ⑵ 5mm with the handle to stabilize the book

it is difficult to deal with the composition of editions with high cost and many types of words (such as classical books), while the composition of editions with many formulas and tables is difficult to meet the quality requirements of composition because of the current low composition technology, although it pays more and proofreading energy

in addition, the proportion of edition cost in plate making cost is bound to increase for publications whose printing volume is doomed to be small

for large print volume publications, it is precisely because the equipment investment in printing and post printing is concentrated, so the academic books with small print volume are certainly disproportionate, but its proportion in the cost is relatively small

the particularly important prepress part can be roughly divided into plate composition, plate (photo), plate making, printing, etc. now, the prospects of the production technology trends are as follows

2. production technology trends (1) group edition

the main movable type group edition in the past has been almost completely eliminated and replaced by computer group edition. Although the early phototypesetting system can still be used and its reliability is not low, it is increasingly used because of the high cost of equipment

at present, the most eye-catching is the desktop top publishing system (DTP). Compared with the original photo typesetting system, the equipment cost of the former is much lower. Therefore, how to replace the old equipment when formulating the new plan must be carefully studied. Now, Macintosh computers have been mostly used on the platform, so the tendency to turn to windows series, which accounts for 90% of computers, has increased

there are still two major problems in this DTP: the type of text, the font and the composition rules. It provides a variety of fonts that basically meet the requirements. The so-called type of text refers to the number of words and whether there are restrictions. In terms of fonts, it usually refers to the number of strokes and stroke order direction of each word. DTP is open in nature, and its premise is the interchangeability between computers. It uses a common code number to specify the text and is used among various computers. In principle, other words cannot be exchanged

although the original phototypesetting system also uses computers, the system is closed (C we call it "batch collection" losed) and is generally used only in the same company, so the words used are of course used after each production

. The standard "JIS x 0208-1997 set of symbolic Chinese characters for 7-bit and 8-bit two byte information exchange", formulated more than 20 years ago, is divided into the first set and the second set. It has 6355 Chinese character codes. The first standard was in 1978, the second standard was in 1983, the third standard was in 1990, and the fourth standard was formulated and published in 1997

the standard was originally formulated for the internal office processing of the government and enterprises, so it focuses on the use of Chinese characters for geographical names and personal names mainly used in administration and office. Some people criticize that although it is enough to measure from office use, it is obviously not enough for the number of words required for general publications

when the standard was first formulated (1978), computers were far from as popular as they are now, so ignoring the standard in the publishing industry would not pose any problems. The publishing industry has adopted the image typesetting system that has been in operation since 1969, and the words in its memory can be used freely

the publishing industry adopts the font of commonly used Chinese characters, while off balance sheet Chinese characters have always been based on the font of Kangxi dictionary. The off table Chinese character font of this commonly used Chinese character is not listed in the JIS code

at this time, the tendency of DTP composition word group edition suddenly appeared. Input, (EDITION) and output are carried out by each unit separately. Since its data has been exchanged by the JIS code, if words and fonts other than the JIS code are used, even the data can not be easily exchanged

jis supplementary standards are being planned, and the third and fourth plans of about 5000 Chinese characters are also being studied intensively. It is expected that the standards can be formulated by the end of this year. If they are installed in various computers, the problem can be solved to a considerable extent (see the clumsy article of the Fifth China Japan publishing and education inter school academic exchange conference in 1997 for details)

the second is the rule of edition

almost all DTP group edition software is made after adding Japanese group edition software to American software

there are conflicting parts between the original western version rules and the Japanese version rules. Justification originally refers to the text adjustment of western language, which is quite different from the number of words in Japanese

there is no concept of word arrangement in western language, and the words in Japanese are square. The premise of type (font) design is a square font, and the president can be adjusted only by increasing or decreasing movable type

dtp group edition software is usually adjusted on the display screen in the form of "WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get", so it is difficult to unify them all. If the adjustment is much more, the correction (addition and subtraction) after proofreading needs to be redone from scratch. DTP edition usually takes the complete manuscript as the premise, and this requirement is just impossible

there are many operation methods that do not conform to the original traditional edition rules (not necessarily written rules) in Japan. The reason why the edition staff do not master the knowledge of edition rules is that they mistakenly believe that as long as they can operate computers skillfully, they can compose editions

field operators are often interested in brain operation technology in industries such as home appliances, new energy vehicles and so on, but never care about the rules of group edition, nor pay attention to education and training venues

JIS x 4051-1995 Japanese document line edition method clearly lists the benchmark of edition rules, and has been loaded into various edition software

the plan to expand the standard into a page group version is in progress

the Japanese industrial standard (JIS), entitled "designated exchange form of Japanese document group edition", is being prepared and may be promulgated by the end of this year. Its purpose is that when using the computer, the author, personnel and group editor can exchange various files including group edition information by sending necessary commands at each stage of operation. It does not need to consider the book body owned by each department, but can select similar books to output

at present, although DTP group edition does not meet the group edition quality required by the publishing industry, most of them still use DTP group edition. It depends on the improvement of software and the education and training of edition personnel to prevent the quality of edition

3. making technology trends (2) plate (Photography)

there are no technicians who used to draw operations manually in the past, and most of them have used computers for DTP mapping. Manual typesetters for composition typesetting are no longer manufactured, so text manuscripts are processed by DTP

photography has almost replaced the addition of contact screen with monochrome scanner scanning. With the rapid popularity of digital cameras, the transition from silver salt type analog photography to digital photography has taken place. This can be directly input into the computer. Now it is mostly used for DTP group edition

at present, the photographic tone is almost no longer corrected by airbrush, but by computer

4. production technology trends (3) plate making

plate printing usually adopts the method of taking a negative picture with a camera from a block copy and then drying out a positive picture. There is also a method of directly exposing the data from the computer on the film and then making a positive image, so that photographic paper can be omitted. At this time, the portrait must be imported into the same file

the method of using laser to directly transmit computer data to CTP (computer to plate) has been put into practice. The so-called direct platemaking without film has been used in small batch printing

this plate making method without film does have the effect of labor-saving method, but its disadvantage is that once it is made, it cannot be corrected, and there is no film when adding printing, so it must be remade

recently, Adobe has made the portable document format Designer (PDF) represented by acrobat practical. As a new technology in the future, it is quite eye-catching. It is a technology that transmits the data in the computer page by page through the communication loop. It is a plate making method that directly transmits the data made by the ordering party, including the plate making genre, to the printing plate of the printing plant. This method is not in the original printing plant, but must be applied in the open system. At present, it still has some instability, which is still in the experimental stage and is only used in a few occasions

5. production technology trends (4) printing

as an on-demand printing machine for small batch printing, computer data is directly transmitted to the plate cylinder of the printing machine, which is attractive because it can reduce the stock of prints. However, its relationship with current issuers is not harmonious. Only in terms of the number of prints required, there must be a margin (at least 500 copies) in the base number of entrusted issuance. We can also consider using the Internet distribution method, but it is to order and sell one volume. The transaction processing of each order is quite cumbersome, and how to publish the publication news is also a problem. It is unrealistic to transmit data through Internet for distribution

the cost of producing raw data is exactly the same as the price at the time of production, so it is not easy to set the price after assuming that several copies can be sold in order to recover the cost

conclusion

an overview of various problems in the computer-centered modern book making system. The situation is fluid, and it is not easy to predict in the future,