Looking at the platemaking technology of the publishing industry in the 21st century

1. The status quo of academic works and the trends of their production techniques The rapid progress and development of academics has always been the pillar of publishing houses 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) Group Edition The main typewriters in the past have almost been completely eliminated and replaced by a computer group 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 formulated (1978), computers were not as popular as they are now, so the publishing industry's ignorance of 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).
Followed by the rules of the rules of the group.
Today's DTP software is almost all made by adding Japanese version software to U.S. software.
There are conflicting parts between the original Western-language version rules and the Japanese group-version rules. Justification refers to the literal adjustment of the Western language, which is totally different from the Japanese word count.
There is no concept of words arranged in the Western language, and the words in Japanese are square. The premise of font design is the square font. Only by adding or subtracting movable characters can the president be adjusted.
DTP groupware is usually adjusted on the monitor screen in the form of WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get, so it is difficult to unify all. If the adjustment is much more, corrections (additions and deletions) after proofreading will need to be repeated from the beginning. The DTP group edition is usually premised on a complete manuscript, and this requirement is precisely impossible.
There are many operating methods that do not conform to the traditional Japanese version rules (which are not necessarily written rules). The reason why the group editors do not know the rules of group rules is because they mistakenly believe that they can make a copy if they can operate a computer. The reason.
On-site operators are often interested in computer-based technology and never care about the rules of the group layout, nor do they pay attention to education and training venues.
The "JIS X 4051-1995 Japanese Document Format Law" clearly lists the rules of the group rules and has been loaded into various software versions.
The plan to expand this standard into page group editions is in progress.
It is preparing to formulate the Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS) entitled "Designated Exchange Form for Japanese Document Group", which may be promulgated at the end of this year. When the purpose is to use a computer, the author, editor, and group sender will send the necessary commands at various stages of operation to exchange the files including the group version information. It does not have to consider how each department has a book, so it can choose similar volumes to output.
Although the current DTP group version does not meet the quality requirements of the publishing community, most of them still use the DTP group version. To prevent the decline in the quality of the composition, it depends on the improvement of the software and the education and training of the team members.

3. Production Technology Trend (2) Plate (Photography)
The type of technicians who used the manual drawing work in the past has disappeared, and most of them have been converted to DTP drawings. The manual image-setter for text imposition is no longer manufactured, so text-based manuscripts are handled by DTP.
Photographs are almost no longer scanned with a contact screen instead of a monochrome scanner. With the rapid popularity of digital cameras, silver halide type analog photography has transitioned to digital photography. This can be directly input into the computer, now used for DTP group version.
Camera color is now almost no longer using an airbrush but a computer to correct the picture.
Color printing is now divided into two major methods, which are layout equipment such as layout scanners and DTP using Macintosh.

4. Production Technology Trends (3) Plate Making Plates are usually produced by taking a negative image from a camera with a block copy and then drying out a positive image. There is also a method of exposing the data from a computer directly to a positive image on a film so that photographic printing paper can be omitted. At this point, the images must be imported into the same file.
The method of laser-transmitting computer data directly to a printing plate (CTP, Computer To Plate) has been put into practical use. Direct filmmaking, which does not require film, has been used in small batch printing.
This method of eliminating the use of film does have a labor-saving effect, but its disadvantage is that it cannot be corrected once it is made, and it must be re-engraved because there is no film.
Recently, Adobe has put the Portable Document Format (PDF) design represented by Acrobat into practical use. It is quite noticeable as a new technology in the future. It is a method for copying data from a computer through a communication loop. Transmission technology. It is the method of making the plate containing the data of the plate making genre made by the ordering party directly on the plate of the printing plant. This method is not used in the original printing plant but must be applied in an open system. At present, it has some unstable places, it is still in the experimental stage, and it is only used in a few occasions.

5. Manufacturing Technology Trends (4) Printing As an on-demand printing machine for short-run printing, the computer data is transmitted directly to the plate cylinder of the printing press, and it attracts attention because it can reduce the inventory of printed materials. However, its relationship with the current issuer is not harmonious. Only from the required number of impressions, there must be a margin (at least 500 copies) for the commissioned base. It is also possible to consider the use of the Internet distribution method, but it is to set a book to sell one book. The transaction processing of each order is rather complicated, and how to publish the publication message is also a problem. It is unrealistic to distribute data via the Internet.
The cost of producing raw data is exactly the same as the price at the time of production. Therefore, to recover the cost, it is assumed that it is not easy to set prices after selling several books.

Conclusion Outlines various issues in computer-centric modern book production systems. The state of affairs is fluid, and the predictions in the future are not easy to define. It will be self-evident that great changes will surely occur.
For this reason, I hope that when new technologies emerge, they should not be used immediately. Instead, they should calmly judge their interests from the technical point of view before making judgments.