Modern – Book&Ver https://www.bookcovercafe.com History of typography: from manual book printing to modern digital technology Tue, 11 Jul 2023 13:28:09 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.1 https://www.bookcovercafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/cropped-BookVer-32x32.jpg Modern – Book&Ver https://www.bookcovercafe.com 32 32 What is Typography? https://www.bookcovercafe.com/what-is-typography/ Tue, 11 Jul 2023 13:28:07 +0000 https://www.bookcovercafe.com/?p=199 Typography is the art and method of arranging type to make written language more appealing to learning and recognition. It’s the visual component of the

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Typography is the art and method of arranging type to make written language more appealing to learning and recognition. It’s the visual component of the written word, essential in conveying your message effectively, especially in an age where information consumption is mainly visual.

The Importance of Typography

Good typography enhances the reading experience and influences the perception of the content. The correct choice of typeface, size, line length, and spacing can significantly affect how a reader perceives and interprets what they read.

The Intersection of Typography and Online Gaming

Interestingly, the principles of typography are not confined to print or websites; they are also crucial in the gaming industry, including the growing world of online casinos.

Introduction to Live Casinos

Live casinos are a relatively new development in the online gambling world, providing the thrill and excitement of a physical casino right from the comfort of your home. Here, you interact with real-life dealers and other players through high-quality video streaming, heightening the immersive experience.

Plinko: A Popular Game in Online Gambling

Among the variety of games offered, Plinko online gambling stands out in the world of online gambling. With its simple yet engaging design, players drop a ball and watch it bounce down to land in a random slot, deciding their winnings. The effective use of typography in Plinko makes the gaming experience seamless and enjoyable.

Elements of Typography

Typography encompasses various elements that contribute to its effectiveness. Key components include typefaces and fonts, which set the visual tone. Line length and spacing affect readability, while color and contrast impact legibility. Additionally, hierarchy establishes a logical flow of information. Considering these elements carefully enhances the impact of typography in written communication.

Typefaces and Fonts

One of the most fundamental elements of typography is the typeface or font. The right font can set the tone and establish the visual identity of your content.

Line Length and Spacing

Line length and spacing also play a crucial role. A comfortable line length and adequate spacing make the text more readable and aesthetically pleasing.

Color and Contrast

The color of your type and its contrast against the background significantly impact readability and user engagement.

How Typography Enhances User Experience in Online Gaming

Typography plays a crucial role in enhancing the user experience in online gaming. Whether it’s reading game instructions or navigating through the game interface, good typography contributes to readability, visual appeal, and overall engagement. Let’s explore how typography enhances the user experience in online gaming:

Readability in Game Instructions:

Clear typography ensures that game instructions are easily readable and understandable. Well-designed fonts with appropriate size, spacing, and contrast make it effortless for players to grasp the rules and objectives of the game. By providing clear instructions, typography enables players to dive into the gaming experience without confusion or frustration.

Visual Appeal and Branding:

Typography plays a vital role in creating visual appeal and establishing the branding of online gaming platforms. Consistent and well-chosen fonts contribute to the overall aesthetics of the game. They can evoke specific moods or themes, enhancing the immersive experience for the players. Moreover, typography that aligns with the platform’s brand identity creates a cohesive and recognizable visual presence, fostering a sense of familiarity and trust among the players.

Typography Mistakes to Avoid

When it comes to typography, there are certain mistakes that should be avoided to ensure effective communication and a visually pleasing design. Here are some common typography mistakes to steer clear of:

  1. Using Too Many Fonts

One of the most common mistakes is using an excessive number of fonts in a single design. While variety can be appealing, using too many fonts can create a cluttered and chaotic look, making it difficult for readers to focus on the content. It’s best to stick to a maximum of two or three fonts that complement each other and maintain consistency throughout your design.

  1.  Neglecting Readability

Typography should always prioritize readability. It’s important to choose fonts that are easy to read, especially when it comes to body text. Avoid using overly decorative or intricate fonts that may strain the reader’s eyes or cause confusion. Additionally, consider the font size and line spacing to ensure comfortable reading experiences across different devices and screen sizes.

  1.  Lack of Hierarchy

Hierarchy is crucial in typography, especially in longer pieces of content or designs with multiple sections. Failing to establish a clear hierarchy can lead to a lack of structure and make it challenging for readers to navigate through the information. Utilize headings, subheadings, and appropriate font weights to create a visual hierarchy that guides the reader and highlights the most important information.

  1.  Poor Kerning and Tracking

Kerning refers to the spacing between individual letters, while tracking refers to the overall spacing between a group of letters. Neglecting proper kerning and tracking can result in awkward gaps or overcrowded letters, impacting the overall aesthetics of your typography. Pay attention to these details and adjust the spacing accordingly to achieve a balanced and visually appealing composition.

  1.  Ignoring Contrast

Contrast plays a significant role in typography. Failing to consider the contrast between your text and its background can diminish readability and accessibility. Ensure that there is enough contrast between the text color and the background color to provide clear legibility, particularly for individuals with visual impairments or when viewed in different lighting conditions.

  1.  Overcomplicating Design

While it’s essential to be creative with typography, it’s crucial not to overcomplicate the design. Complex and elaborate type treatments might appear visually striking at first glance, but they can distract readers from the actual content. Strive for simplicity and clarity, allowing the typography to enhance the message rather than overpower it.

Conclusion

Whether in print, websites, or even in live casinos like Plinko online gambling, typography is a crucial aspect that can significantly impact user experience and content perception. Therefore, understanding its principles and avoiding common mistakes is vital for effective communication.

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What Typography is and Why It’s Important for Design https://www.bookcovercafe.com/what-typography-is-and-why-its-important-for-design/ Sat, 25 Feb 2023 22:49:00 +0000 https://www.bookcovercafe.com/?p=132 We tell you who a typeface designer is, what typeface pairings are for, and whose typeface work is a must-see. Every day we encounter a

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We tell you who a typeface designer is, what typeface pairings are for, and whose typeface work is a must-see.

Every day we encounter a lot of information – on the Internet, on billboards, or on street posters. Teams of marketers and designers work to get our attention. Often a designer’s work with type is invisible to the viewer and type is taken for granted. But typography is a very important part of design. A poorly chosen font can ruin any idea, even the most interesting one. Well-chosen fonts make the design harmonious and set the mood.

You can make a good ad without good typography, but you can’t make a great ad without good typography.

What is typography

The word “typography” comes from the Greek τύπος “imprint” and γράφω “writing” and means the artistic design of text with fonts, symbols and signs. Moreover, typography refers to both work with large amounts of text – for example, the composition of magazines and books, and the creation of fonts – the design of all its characters.

In today’s world, typography is used to create logos, advertising and city navigation.

Typography is the art of giving human language a strong visual form.

Before the advent of digital technology, typography was restricted to professionals – in the Middle Ages they rewrote books by hand, repeating the forms of letters, and then their work moved on to book printing. Today almost everyone is familiar with typography, whether for presentations or social media posts.

Working with typography in the layout, the designer:

  • selects fonts, their shapes and densities;
  • works with the compatibility of fonts and size ratio;
  • distributes the text in the layout, selects the size;
  • forms the positioning of text blocks and freestanding font elements;
  • makes up font compositions;
  • The designer may also develop a font by himself.

Who is a font designer

In addition to working with the design of text information in layouts, there is another direction in typography – font design.

First, good typography makes words easy to read. But ideally, it does more than that: it helps convey the inspiring spirit of the ideas behind the words.

A type designer develops new character designs – letters, numbers, punctuation and special characters. Such designers work mainly in font studios (sometimes they are also called by the beautiful word “slovoletni”) whose main specialization is the production of new fonts. They can be fonts of wide application as well as corporate fonts. They are ordered by brands who want to use a unique font in their image that is associated only with their company.

History of typography

The art of typography became an independent field approximately in the XI century with the appearance of Gothic writing and Blackletter font on the basis of calligraphy. At that time books were copied by hand, there were quite few of them and they were considered a luxury item. The lettering was richly decorated and the shapes of the letters of the main text in Gothic script were dictated by the way the pen was driven across the paper.

What is typography: medieval writing

Everything changed in the mid-15th century when the German printer Johannes Gutenberg invented the mechanical method of typography and created the first printing press. The text began to be typed from lead letters – letters, which were placed in typesetting forms. Since books at the time were mostly religious, the first printed book was the Bible.

In the 20th century, with the advent of personal computers and the first desktop publishing systems, typography became digital, which completely changed the industry. Typography became much more accessible, and the development of fonts could not only be done by specialists in the workshops. Fonts themselves have also changed – they must now be readable on a screen. Typographic forms are a thing of the past – in the new era, pages of printed text are generated entirely on the computer.

As the Internet developed, typographers encountered a problem – when creating web pages, they could not predict the type and size of the font that would be installed on the reader’s computer. Different operating systems and browsers used different headsets, and their size depended on screen resolution and system settings. It wasn’t until the tens that technology made it possible to integrate arbitrary fonts into websites, setting the tone of the entire web page. You are now reading an article typed in Graphik font, even though it is not preinstalled on your computer.

Font Classification

For convenience, fonts are divided into groups. This classification helps you to understand which font is best to use, and describes its main characteristics.

Typographic fonts

These fonts are designed to display large amounts of text – they are often used in books, longreads and articles. Typefaces need to be legible and neutral as their primary aim is to make the text easy and pleasant to read. There is a separate group of typesetting fonts called text fonts. Their peculiarity is the legibility even in a small size.

Antique fonts

Antique scripts, or antiqua, is the common name for a group of serif fonts. They are based on Roman fonts, although in the antiquity they had only uppercase letters. Sagittarius typefaces appeared in the Renaissance.

At the end of the XVIII century French and Italian typographers – Bodoni and Dido – created an updated version of antiqua, which became the basis of many modern typefaces. During the development of book printing, antiqua became the main typeface for typesetting.

One of the most popular antiquarian fonts is Times New Roman. It was developed in 1931 by English typographer Stanley Morison of Monotype and Victor Landert, designer of Times magazine. The typeface was originally created just for the magazine, but it was later released on the market. In the nineties Microsoft created its own version of the typeface, embedding it in the Windows operating systems, and then in Microsoft Word, which made the Times New Roman particularly popular.
What is typography: antique fonts and antiqua (grotesque fonts)

Grotesque fonts

Grotesque fonts, or grotesques, are a group of fonts without serifs. The first grotesque was developed in 1816 by the type designer William Ceslon IV. However, they were named after another typeface, Seven Lines Grotesque. It was produced by the designer William Thorogood in 1832.

At the end of the century, the Berthold foundry introduced its new typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk, which was the basis of many modern grotesques. She suggested its use for the design of advertising headlines. Smooth, even letters contrasted strongly with the sophistication of the antique. But today grotesques are used as typefaces, for titles and navigation.

For a long time, grotesques were not very popular, but after the Second World War they received a second birth. Designers wanted to find a new visual language, different from the wartime and pre-war. So appeared Swiss typography, its other name – international style. Its main features are universality, legibility, clarity and functionality.

One of the most famous and popular grotesque typefaces is Helvetica. It was designed by the type designer Max Miedinger in 1957 for the owner of the Haas type company, Edward Hoffman, based on the early grotesques. The typeface proved so versatile that it was used everywhere: in typesetting, logos, elements of city navigation.

Adrian Frutiger is another important typographer and representative of the Swiss school which greatly contributed to the development of typography. He designed fonts such as Frutiger and Univers which also became grotesque classics.

Accidental fonts

This group of fonts is not mentioned in any of the above categories: its other name is the ornamental typefaces. They are used for volumes with a small amount of text, to which you want to draw attention. Accidental fonts are often used for logos, too. In the same category fall stylizations – under the handwritten fonts or letters that look like typewriter fonts.
Accidental fonts are not suitable for typing solid text and are readable only in large sizes.

Lettering

Lettering differs from type design in that each of these lettering is unique. The characters are drawn by hand, which brings this technique closer to calligraphy. Lettering is not usually used to create fonts, but it is often used for posters, beautiful lettering and in logos.

Some of the accented fonts imitate lettering, but what gives them away is that the letters in them are the same – it would be impossible to reproduce them so precisely by hand.

The combination of fonts

Knowing how to combine fonts is essential to creating a good design project with multiple fonts. Usually in the design is recommended to use no more than two, maximum three fonts in one layout. A well-chosen combination of two fonts is called a pair of fonts.

The most successful combinations of fonts are formed on the principle of similarity or, conversely, contrast. This means that two fonts should have either some common features, or, conversely, radically differ. The easiest way to combine fonts is by likeness, i.e. to use different styles of one typeface. For example, the main typeface – with bold or italics.

Much harder to pair on the contrast. It can work well, for example, when combining an antique font with a sans serif font. But in this case, fonts must be in harmony, not in conflict. In order to make a successful combination, it is necessary to know the properties of fonts. Beginning designers can use the ready-made Internet service, selecting the successful combinations.

How to use the font without copyright infringement

Most of the fonts that designers use are paid. To use them in projects you need to buy a license – just “download” the font and install it on your computer can’t.

Fonts are purchased in specialized stores, on the websites of independent design studios and developers. When buying carefully read the license. Its type determines the scope of the font – for example, the license allows you to use the Desktop font almost anywhere, except sites. However, different vendors have different licenses for the same type – for example, most companies allow the use of fonts under the Desktop license for logos, but there are also those for which it is necessary to buy a separate license for logos.

There are also free fonts. These include system fonts installed with operating systems or from specialized libraries. The largest library of free fonts is Google Fonts. The advantage of fonts from this library can be attributed to the fact that they can be used freely without paying.

But there is a serious drawback: these fonts are chosen to save and use more often, so that the uniqueness of their use is almost impossible, and the work will not look solid. Partly to save the situation can be the use of the latest, just released free fonts.

Main types of licenses:

Desktop – suitable for many programs, documents, logos, and social media. Webfont – allows you to embed fonts on the site, its cost depends on the attendance of the resource.

App – designed to use fonts in mobile applications, the cost of the license affects the number of downloads.

Digital Ads – for using fonts on banner ads on the Internet; the more displays, the more expensive the license. Server – gives the right to place the file on the server and use the purchased font on many computers.

Where to look fonts

Adobe Fonts

Large font store from Adobe. Here you can find very high quality fonts and many are accompanied by a story about the font or the studio that created it. All the designers of the project have personal pages on the site, where you can see their other fonts and read their biographies. In the Typography studios section we have a full alphabetical list of the companies that are partners of the store, and a list of the most interesting font producers, according to Adobe.

Pangram Pangram

Canadian wordpress company Pangram Pangram employs just eight people. Every typeface in Pangram has a specially designed page with description, history, glyphs and recommendations on how to use the font. An interesting section is Font in Use, where the company collects design examples using its fonts. All the fonts can be downloaded for free for personal use, the license should be purchased only for commercial and public works.

OH no Type

California-based OH no Type is made up of only one designer, its founder James Edmondson. He says he started the company to do things he likes in fonts that aren’t on MyFonts.com. James’s store is full of experimental and variant fonts, which are presented in impressive animations. For some fonts there are photos with examples of how they work “in real life”, others have a detailed description of the creation process. The fonts can be used free of charge for personal use and some non-commercial projects.

Conclusion

Working with fonts is one of the basic skills of a designer. Good typography makes a design stand out and understandable. Bad typography can ruin everything. To master this science, you should follow trends, have a good eye and develop a sense of style. Our articles will help with that, too.

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The Role of Printing in the Promotion of Products and Services https://www.bookcovercafe.com/the-role-of-printing-in-the-promotion-of-products-and-services/ Thu, 03 Nov 2022 16:40:00 +0000 https://www.bookcovercafe.com/?p=129 Do you want to sell more products, attract new customers or do you want to increase the popularity of your products and services? You can’t

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Do you want to sell more products, attract new customers or do you want to increase the popularity of your products and services? You can’t do without advertising – the most effective tool in marketing and business promotion. If people know about you, your corporate logo is easily recognizable, and your symbols evoke a loyal attitude, it means that your advertising campaign was successful and you are able to influence the opinion of consumers.

The use of printing plays an important role in the promotion of goods and services. Printed products are inexpensive, easy to produce and effective enough to use them periodically or constantly for advertising purposes.

The main advantages of printing in the promotion of goods and services:

  • Visualization of the offer. You can visually show customers: how good your product looks, what the advantage of your services is, how successful your business is.
  • Attracting a large segment of potential customers, popularizing services among existing customers and business partners. By distributing printed products – booklets, flyers, brochures, leaflets – you influence the opinion of those who will read the information. Your main task in this case – to make a “picture” bright and attractive by means of design, advertising slogans and text.
  • The targeting of certain types of printing products. Any printing products are used for some purpose depending on the marketing strategy. For example, booklets can be distributed not only to potential consumers but also to the company’s customers, business partners and interested audience. The purpose of the advertising campaign and means of printing you determine yourself, as well as the place where handouts are used – near the subway entrance, in supermarkets, shopping malls, at exhibitions or at the reception desk in the office.
  • An integrated approach to the use of printing. As a means of outdoor advertising, printing is most effective in a comprehensive approach during the promotion of goods and services. For example, if you advertise a group of products, you need to print leaflets with prices and offers, order the production of booklets with catalogs, hand out flyers in places of large crowds of people.
  • If you want to increase the popularity of the brand, then printing printing printing with brand logos – calendars, notebooks, letterheads and other office paraphernalia.
  • Using polygraphy to confirm a company’s high status and successful image.
  • Printed products are suitable for effective business promotion during exhibitions, business forums, presentations and actions, where a package of handouts is used. For this purpose, several unique promotional products designed in a single style with company logos, symbols and concise information are developed.

Advertising printing is highly informative and easy to present information. At a low cost, it is an excellent means of advertising that evokes positive emotions in customers. It should be noted that consumer loyalty is largely influenced by the quality of printing and the consistency of informative content. To achieve success using printed products, order the design of booklets, flyers, leaflets and other products from professional printers and designers.

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Offset Printing https://www.bookcovercafe.com/offset-printing/ Sat, 21 May 2022 23:29:00 +0000 https://www.bookcovercafe.com/?p=126 The most common printing method today is offset printing. Naturally, in the area of offset printing there is also improvement of printing equipment for sheet

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The most common printing method today is offset printing. Naturally, in the area of offset printing there is also improvement of printing equipment for sheet and roll printing, modernization as well as the creation of new printing equipment and active introduction of new printing technologies. Let us take a look at some of the innovations for this method of printing, implemented in production.

Offset printing without dampening

Since ancient times it was known that offset (flat) printing is based on selective wetting of printing and non-printing elements located in one plane. In this case the non-printing elements before the printing process should be moistened, otherwise there will be rolling of ink across the whole surface of the printing plate. Only when wetted will the non-printing elements repel the ink from their surface, ensuring that it rolls onto the printing elements only and thus prints.

But after a long search in early 1982 the Japanese company Toray Industries created the technology of dry (waterless) offset, which does not require dampening of the non-printing elements and allows the press to work without dampening unit. According to this technology, silicone rubber is used to create an ink-repellent layer on the printing plate’s non-printing elements. Japan was the first country where this technology was first tried, and then it began to be used in Europe and other regions of the world, arousing great interest among printers.

We will not study in detail the rather thorny path of offset without dampening to printing companies. But we should note that this method has now become an industrial technology for which offset printing machines are created and modernized, there are special printing inks and papers, and numerous studies and recommendations on the optimum technology. The European Waterless Printing Association EWPA (European Waterless Printing Association) has been operating in Europe for more than 5 years and holds its annual meetings.

Wet offset has found its industrial application in both web and sheetfed printing. Various printing inks have been developed for it, including those with ultraviolet drying. Such inks have a rather complicated composition in comparison with ordinary offset inks. Suffice it to say that they contain up to 8 components. They consist of the pigment, binder system, rheological auxiliary agent, mineral oils or vegetable-based oils, wax, siccative, anticaking agent and other additives. In turn, the binder includes solid resins, mineral oils, vegetable-based oils, and auxiliaries for gelatinizing the binder.

Equipment is already available, as well as materials for the digital recording of information on special plate materials for offset without dampening. Among the pioneers in the introduction of this method in production we find digital printing machines Karat (KBA company), machines with direct digital recording of information on the plate material DI (Direct Imaging) of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG. Analog and digital plate materials for this method are produced by Presstek and Kodak Polychrome Graphics. The technical capabilities of the process already make it possible to use offset without dampening on web offset presses, including newspaper printing (KBA and MAN Roland).

It turned out that the many advantages of offset without dampening outweighed its economic disadvantages and the printing and technical difficulties that existed so far.

In more than 5 years of the EWPA work, a lot of experience has been accumulated in the work of printing companies with this technology, which makes it possible to offer certain practical recommendations. The main problem in non-wetting offset, as well as in standard offset, is maintaining a constant ink unit temperature which is why printing machines are equipped with ink unit and cylinder cooling devices, pumps with compressors providing heat supply in order to secure high quality of the product. In offset without dampening the need of reducing the surface temperature of rollers and blanket and offset cylinders to 24°C with very narrow tolerances is very important. Therefore special temperature maintenance equipment is required – this is the main focus of the EWPA. As a result of research and recommendations made by the Dutch company VIS-Sensorcontrol, special non-contact infrared sensors were created to automatically control each of the coloring machines of a multicolor machine and to regulate the temperature of each coloring machine.

In this way, offset without dampening is successfully making its way into the offset industry and, what’s more, is already being used successfully in a number of plants.

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Scanners and Digital Cameras at Newspaper Enterprises https://www.bookcovercafe.com/scanners-and-digital-cameras-at-newspaper-enterprises/ Mon, 15 Mar 2021 04:18:00 +0000 https://www.bookcovercafe.com/?p=123 Digital technology has come to the printing industry, not just digital printing, but virtually all prepress, printing and postpress production processes integrated into digital Workflow.

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Digital technology has come to the printing industry, not just digital printing, but virtually all prepress, printing and postpress production processes integrated into digital Workflow.

There are many examples of how print production is improving on a completely new basis.

The global fleet of scanners has increased. There are now many models already available that can meet any customer requirement. But at the same time, there has been a fantastic growth in both quantity and quality of the intensively developing digital cameras, which also solve many printing production tasks at the highest level.

But what about “displacement”? It must be said that, despite the absence of any flaunting of their infallibility and competitiveness, there are certain processes going on in this direction, by which the reader can judge for himself whether there is any displacement of the scanner by the digital camera or, on the contrary, their positive aspects are combined for the purpose of further optimization of production processes.

In the printing industry, including newspaper production, a number of new technologies using scanners have emerged that force a new look at the work of the photojournalist working in newspaper and magazine production. What are these technologies?

Here are some examples

Abroad, more and more newspapers are changing their methods of managing illustration information throughout the entire stage of newspaper creation by using purposeful end-to-end Workflow production process management systems in the publishing house and print shop.

For a relatively long time (about 15 years), major foreign newspaper publishers have been using black-and-white scanner technology. It consists of the following. All the films that come into production are scanned in a complete set. The desired photos are selected on the computer monitor, and all the others are erased from its memory. Now this technology, thanks to the emergence of new, affordable and acceptable quality photos, as well as the appropriate software scanners, is used even in small newspapers.

The way the technology worked was this. Outside editorial offices of newspapers that had long been using NIS, photojournalists would send photos on paper to the central editorial office. There, the photos were taken to the scanning department, where they were read by a high-resolution black-and-white scanner. The images were processed at high speed (up to 80 scans per hour) using the appropriate software: their sharpness and gradation characteristics were corrected, the desired scale was set, cropping and rastering were done. This was the fastest method of obtaining a screened paper image for adhesive mounting.

However, the increasing decentralization of newspaper production, the lowering of the price of scanners and the expansion of their range, the appearance and improvement of digital cameras and their use in production processes, digital data transmission methods and the possibilities of integrating text and illustrations, including in color, have radically changed the technological process of creating newspaper pages. Outside editorial offices began to make extensive use of reflective and transmitted light scanners. Direct film scanners and digital cameras have made it possible to do without photographic paper. This saves time and materials and avoids loss of quality. Some editors prefer to use transparencies for scanning. However, the creation of a number of negative scanners that are easy to use, have high productivity (Kodak, Polaroid, Nikon), and provide high image quality, has allowed many editorial offices to opt for negative technology, eliminating the production of prints.

The further development of technology made it a priority to create a technology that would eliminate the flow of paper prints from production altogether. This is provided by digital technology using digital cameras and the evaluation of photo prints on a computer monitor screen. A paper printout can be made for an editorial conference, and multiple versions of the photos can be shown on it. Some major newspaper printers have in the last few years switched to negative high throughput scanners (like the Kodak PIW, originally created for making photo CDs). These scanners can scan up to 300 high quality images in an hour. And this transition turned out to be exceptionally rational for them.

The technology here goes like this: the editor sends the film by pneumatic mail to the central darkroom, where it is developed and scanned. In half an hour the editor and the photographer can evaluate the photo on the monitor. With this technology, up to 95% of the images are usually erased after selection. The processing of images in the Workflow, as well as their subsequent archiving, is done with the help of specially created software. Many medium and small newspapers hold the belief that automatic scanning is an expensive process. And this is true, because the cost of automatic scanners reaches $50,000 or more. An inexpensive alternative is the Konica (RX-1) or Sony (UY-S77) scanners, whose scanning speed is up to 9 seconds per frame and whose data recording into computer memory is 16 seconds. The price for them is $6-7 thousand. The offered FotoStation software can determine any resolution of photos and calculates data for it.

For newsrooms that do not work entirely on digital technology, there is an alternative: the entire film is pre-scanned for a few seconds on a Sony scanner and the images are displayed on the monitor. Suitable frames are selected and then scanned for further processing.

There is also another option: a pre-scan is performed at each workstation with the FotoStation and the resulting images are marked; the operator then scans the marked frames at the desired resolution. Editorial offices working in a decentralized way scan themselves in order to shorten the image path from the photographer to the editor. Thus, a small local newsroom can have a scanner in-house. All of these methods lead to the abandonment of the newspaper’s reproduction department, and in its place, a pictorial information department with digital cameras and scanners is created. The photographer there is not the supplier of raw material, but the editor’s partner in selecting appropriate subjects. He is also responsible for the quality of the print. Thus, scanning negatives is a cost-effective solution for the newspaper, especially for reading large volumes of information, an investment that quickly pays for itself.

The electronic formation of newspaper pages is made up of various blocks of editorial, advertising and illustration information. Until very recently, drum scanners were superior to flatbed scanners in this process, both technically and qualitatively. For they, giving an optical resolution of over 10,000 dpi, 48-bit color depth and high optical density (over 4.0 D), left far behind flatbed models that provide a physical resolution of no more than 1200 dpi. This led to the need to interpolate missing illustration information, which significantly reduced the quality of photographs. The advantages of flatbed scanners are their relatively low cost (no more than $1,500 for mid-range devices) as well as their ease of use. For example, their maintenance does not require a qualified operator. But here an important role is played by the quality of components, which can be different.

In general, the quality of scanning is determined by means of special test tables. High-performance scanner software can partially or completely eliminate all the shortcomings of a scanner.

With such programs, you can adjust the optical density interval, contrast, and color saturation in detail. When scanning, the selection of an appropriate color space is also important, and further image processing requires the selection of a scan-supported data format. An increasingly important issue for flatbed scanners is the optimal use of color management. Thus, flatbed scanners are not as effective as drum scanners when the imaging material is problematic, the magnification is large and reproduction quality must be particularly high. For conventional publications, on the other hand, they are quite acceptable, having a good productivity/price ratio, relatively easy maintenance and better integration into the production Workflow.

Large newspapers are always faced with the challenge of getting information, illustrations and ads out quickly from their external newsrooms and processing them further. The new Workflow organization now provides a way for external newsrooms to scan finished pages and deliver them to the central newsroom. In order to bring this information closer to the reader, publishers are restructuring their prepress processes, primarily by introducing digital Workflow and the latest digital prepress technology. Scanners play a major role in the modernization of the newspaper production process, and they have become widely used by editorial offices in their decentralized newspaper preparation process. As a rule, scanners of A3+ newspaper format are used. An example of such a scanner is the EskoScan 1318 from Purup-Eskofot, which offers high productivity and good page quality. In one of the external editorial offices of the German newspaper publisher Sdwest Presse, three such scanners enable the production of 50 to 150 advertising pages per week, with an average ink factor of 1.5. A variety of originals and scanning methods are used here. In the first place among the scanning methods is the CopyDot technology which digitizes mainly screened originals of transmitted light and film.

Thus, the scanned full strips are sent to the central editorial office for intermediate storage. For each of the stories, the server there generates preview data arrays which are used to layout the strips. The scanners are integrated into the production network. This technology makes it possible to obtain complete newspaper strips from external locations, which are corrected, supplemented and output on film or paper. The EskoScan 1318, unlike many other A3 flatbed scanners, is served by its own workstation, which operates the JPS (Job Preparation Station). The originals are mounted on a carrier base and placed on the digitizing board with the help of a pin alignment. The JPS software determines the scanning parameters, and the operator puts the mounted original into the scanner, where the scanning is performed. The scanner has three operating modes: normal, high-speed, and high-quality. The high-speed mode with a resolution of 1270 dpi is especially popular with newspapers. It takes about 7 minutes to scan one black and white ad. The return on investment of the scanner is very fast, mainly due to the reduction in shipping and courier costs.

Of course, the best results are obtained by using a scanner and a digital camera. Digital cameras make it easier to select and process illustrations. The use of digital technology enhances the quality and cost-effectiveness of the preparation and production of newspaper, magazine, excerpts, and other publications.

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