The Lamb print

Sunday, February 15, 2009

One job I've been working on lately is the printing of our book, "The Lamb". In essence, it should be a straight-forward print, because in English, we've printed this 2 or 3 times before. The print company has all the files, and all that's needed for us to say we'll order, they give us books and we send them money. However, for each reprint, often there are changes, mostly small issues. One such is the copyright date. So we need to send files for those changes, which is often not a big deal.

This time it's a little more complicated, because we are printing 4 versions of the same book. English (a reprint), Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, and Luxembourgish. The neat thing about printing these, is that 3 of the 4 colors on press don't change. The book is designed in such a way that by changing only the black plates, you get another translation. This saves work as well as cost. There is only one page in the book that requires a full-color change.

With other books, Rachel is the one who formats and arranges the translations. But for The Lamb, that has been my responsibility. So I get to format translations, send proofs, receive corrections and send out again. And again. And again. Once things are finished, I output files used for printing.

So the only challenge is arrange all the files to get ready for sending to the printer. For The Lamb, there are at least 5 files for each translation, which isn't too bad. This includes the Audio CD, the label for the CD, the text, the cover, and the paper jacket cover. For the English there are individual pages that need correcting. So, there's more individual files, but typically only one page each.

We are getting close to sending the files for this print, hopefully it will be sent this next week. It might be 2 months after that before the books actually arrive.