A brief discussion on the collage technology in A5 Composition Notebooks CorelDRAW

A brief discussion on the collage technology in A5 Composition Notebooks CorelDRAW

 

When it comes to the category of pre-press production work, we have to mention the typesetting of books or magazines. Because of the standard and industry standardization of books and magazines, this method has a certain degree of skill and execution. At present, most of the printing houses are still in the way of manual printing of books and magazines, but with the gradual promotion of electronic digital typesetting technology, computer typesetting will replace manual typesetting. For the selection of computer typesetting software, most domestic producers use PageMaker, Founder of Peking University and some graphics such as CorelDRAW, Illustrator, FreeHand and other software. Some foreign enterprises are teaching mainland production personnel to introduce some more advanced scientific professional typesetting software, such as QuarkXPress. In addition to PageMaker, QuarkXPress and other typesetting software, I choose CorelDRAW, a large-scale professional software that is the most widely used graphic image and typesetting in China, to make some simple typesetting introduction.

 

CorelDRAW is a professional drawing software, but also a very powerful typesetting software, the current market can see any kind of book or publication, almost no it can not do the project. The majority of domestic graphic designers and prepress production personnel, all have the necessary understanding and mastery of it, and another image processing software Photoshop constitutes a necessary tool for graphic designers to work on the post.

 

1. Layout

The default page layout of the CorelDRAW working environment is to use an internationally widely used A4 office paper, this paper is for the office rather than for the book magazine layout, so when we use CorelDRAW for the book magazine layout work, we must carry out some Settings of this layout, of course, We can also completely ignore the existence of such paper, and adopt another better way to handle the environment we are going to work on, which is to use some rectangular boxes to visually represent the actual paper requirements we want.

 

The method introduced in this article is not carried out in accordance with the typesetting method required by CorelDRAW software itself, but according to the personal experience of the pre-press work I have been engaged in, the purpose is to hope that some of the production personnel engaged in pre-press work to introduce a brick, for the readers to open up another typesetting road. Therefore, if there are readers who are skeptical about the typesetting method of this article, they do not need to carry out some unnecessary suspicion, but can completely find out a more suitable typesetting method according to the method introduced in this article, combined with their own practical experience in the actual work, of course, the typesetting method introduced in this article is believed to be suitable for some beginners who are just engaged in pre-press work.

 

For readers who use CorelDRAW to typeset books and magazines, this article does not have any technical prerequisites, and only requires readers to pull out CorelDRAW from the Start → program menu of Windows.

 

When CorelDRAW opens, it creates a desktop window similar to Word and other office software, as shown in Figure 1, except for a few menu items and tools.

 

Select the Type tool of the toolbox, click the mouse at any place in the working window and drag it in a certain direction. A rectangular box will be drawn in the window. There is a mark on the lower right corner or just below the box that can change the size of this box. Here we set the box size to 170mm x 257mm (assuming the size of the finished product is A4 paper size and the four peripheral distances are 2cm each), as shown in Figure 2. Click the left mouse button in this box to enter text.

 

In a normal book or magazine, it is impossible to only exist some simple symbols such as text, and we will insert some pictures and other objects according to the needs of different article content or layout. In CorelDRAW, you can insert external pictures processed by other software, you can also use its own powerful drawing function to create some pictures to insert. No matter what form the images are brought in, we need to embed them in the text.

 

Inserting an image into text is very simple, just select the image you want to insert and set it in the "Paragraph text around the image" on the formatting toolbar. In this tool, CorelDRAW provides us with rich text around the graph function, can be left or right, or up and down or four sides around the picture, and so on, as shown in Figure 3.

 

When inserting a picture into the text, CorelDRAW's good prepress automation function has preset the standard picture and text embedding specifications for us, of course, we can also fully according to their own good or layout needs for some custom Settings, in order to make the picture and text embedding more beautiful or reasonable. Figure 4 shows what happens when you insert the image into the text.

 

If the text and pictures of the book or magazine to be edited are all entered, we need to put the arranged content into the paper for printing or large-format printing on the press. This step is also very simple, we just need to line up all the content containing objects such as images to select the group, and then use the alignment tool to align this content to the center of the paper, or anywhere on the paper. Figure 5 is a rendering of the image aligned to the center of the paper. This method applies to the software's default page format to arrange multi-page sequential editions.

 

The above mentioned by the default way of CorelDRAW typesetting, means that on a page only placed a page of the finished page number within the layout content. If you want to continue to arrange the contents of the next page in the same file, you must add a new page number to place.

 

In addition to the above mentioned will line up the text content of CorelDRAW default paper center, you can also draw a rectangle box consistent with the actual paper size as a virtual page, so that you can put more page content on a page, such as press to put, you can put 16 or 32 page numbers on a page. No need to add new page numbers.

 

In the page layout, will use a lot of header and footer and other objects, in the general layout software have a good automatic layout of the header footer project, but in CorelDRAW does not come with this function, but we can through this software powerful graphics and layout function to manually place. In this respect, CorelDRAW is slightly inferior to PageMaker, QuarkXPress, etc., but that's not to say that it can't be done with CorelDRAW, on the contrary, it can sometimes be more aesthetically pleasing.

 

If you want to arrange the header footer item on the page, you can first make the header footer in the next blank space, and then use the copy, paste, arrange and align the header footer and other functions to arrange the header footer in any position we want. Figure 8 shows the page with the added header and footer.

 

2, typesetting precautions

Other layout Settings in the book typesetting are basically similar to Office software such as Word, Jinshan Office, etc., such as paragraphs, word and line spacing, font size changes, cutting and copying and other moves, alignment, first word sinking, tabs, tables (in CorelDRAW can make any complex form of paper, But not like Excel and other professional tabulating software can automatically calculate, can not automatically generate charts) and so on. All these operations can basically be achieved by calling the corresponding function items in the "text" menu in the menu bar.

 

After the graphic layout is completed, if it is placed in accordance with the default page format of CorelDRAW, the page number, binding line and other layout items can be automatically generated in the "print" item, and the page number order can be changed at will; If you use a virtual page on the same page surface (that is, draw a large rectangular box such as paper to replace the actual paper default CorelDRAW) typesetting and placing the graphic content, some page numbers and other items need to be manually adjusted. Some people may think that manual adjustment is not suitable for multi-page book layout, in fact, this is superfluous consideration:

 

First, ordinary printing houses rarely receive thick books to print, and professional printing houses based on printing books, the typesetting software used is basically Peking University Founder and other software, compared with widely circulated magazines or similar propaganda albums, the page number is mostly only between one or two hundred pages;

 

Second, we can fully use CorelDRAW's powerful copy and paste function to achieve; Few programs can match CorelDRAW's copy-and-paste capabilities, which are too complicated for a book of hundreds of pages, but give us a much freer form of page arrangement. In this way we can very easily arrange the page numbers to any place we want without worrying about the wrong position.

 

Most people who are used to PageMaker, Peking University Founder, QuarkXPress and other typesetting software think that using CorelDRAW to typeset is too slow, in fact, it is completely not arranged the number of pages in a file. Compared with the above software, CorelDRAW for more than 50 or 60 pages of file operation speed is really a little inconvenient, but in fact dozens or even hundreds of pages at the same time emissions in a file, for the later plate making personnel is very troublesome, they still have to go to make a printed version of these pages out to rearrange. For printing with too many page numbers, we do not need to arrange all the page files in one file, we can adjust the number of pages in the file according to the actual situation of printing, such as the maximum printing page of the printing press can only print 16 page numbers, then we can arrange 16 page files in one file, which speeds up the speed of file operation. In this way, a 300-page book only needs to be made into 20 or so files, although at first sight it seems too many files, not as convenient as PageMaker and other files, but for plate makers, a file is just the number of pages of a standard print edition. And a lot of plate makers also like to use CorelDRAW to spell a large version, if it is the use of this grammar, a file is a version, the operation is very convenient.

 

There are also many typographers who believe that CorelDRAW does not have PageMaker and other convenient arrangements for graphics, which is also the result of not understanding CorelDRAW, and the diagram of the picture in CorelDRAW is only more than CorelDRAW. You can either arrange the pattern in a link format like PageMaker (which is much clearer and more eye-catching than in PageMaker, and if you want to achieve this clarity with PageMaker, you lose the speed advantage of PageMaker), or you can import the pattern into a file. The choice of whether to use links when importing patterns can be selected in the dialog box when importing patterns.

In professional typesetting software such as PageMaker and QuarkXPress, there is a "co-binding" function that combines several files into one file, which is unfortunately not convenient for our typesetting work in CorelDRAW. This also made it difficult for us to arrange the catalogue of books - we had to make the catalogue by hand.

 

The arranged layout file is eventually to be taken out of the film to make a printed version, in this process, many people who have first contact with the layout work have ignored a serious problem - font compatibility. Except for some large printing houses, most printing houses can complete typesetting and other work, but they rarely complete the output work themselves, but send some professional output companies to produce film or even print editions. At this time, the file will be transferred from the enterprise to the output company, and you have to consider the problem of font compatibility. If it is only one or two pages of the document, we can convert all the text into curves, but this method is not suitable for multi-page documents; Another method is to transfer all files to EPS format files, but this method is good, but sometimes may bring some other problems, but also increase the physical storage of files; The best way is to store CorelDRAW's default Cdr file in a storage body (such as a CD or MO), as well as the industry's common Eps file, and copy the font used in the file to the storage body, so that after the file is transferred, you do not have to worry about unnecessary trouble due to font compatibility.

 

Now some foreign capital and some large printing enterprises in the mainland began to appear remote revision, reading, proofing and printing production processes, as well as the circulation of documents on the network. This requires our production staff to do a good job in addition to typesetting, composition, output and other work, but also learn to circulate on the network of documents - html files or PDF files. Html file is a page file used on the network, requiring the physical storage capacity of the file as small as possible to facilitate browsing on the network, circulation, these matters to pay attention to can be selected in the "file" menu output to the Interner item. In addition to making Html files for network circulation, sometimes we have to convert files to another standard file that can be circulated in any operating platform and any language - PDF files. Such files can be distributed according to the layout on our local computer, regardless of the operating system or the language installed on the system. Notes for exporting such files can be set and selected in the "File" menu in the release of PDF file function.