Formatting Books and Print Material

I have been translating books into Persian since 1995. Most of the time, I do all the formatting for my books. So, this is an important topic for me. I’d like to share with you some insights about how to prepare and format books in here.
As far as I know, Adobe InDesign is the current standard application for preparing print material and publishing. In fact, this application is mostly used by publishers. On the other hand, Microsoft Word is the general-purpose word processing application. The majority of books and documents are authored in Word, even though the publishers may convert the document to Adobe InDesign for formatting and printing. Another important system for preparing print material is TeX and Latex, which can be thought of as the standard system for authoring mathematical texts.
What I am going to present here is not just about what application to use. Preparing a book, especially mathematical, scientific, and technical books, involves many challenges that may not be satisfactorily solved by these standard applications. For some projects, you may be better off using some other technique.

The process of preparing a document for print involves two important steps:

1. Authoring

This is the process of preparing the book document. This is usually done in Microsoft Word or similar word processors, such as OpenOffice, Google Docs, etc. However, for technical documents, you may prepare XML and XSL files or use other systems.
For a large and complicated document, such as a book, you will usually need to give your document a structure, i.e. divide the document into sections, use multi-level headings, use cross-references, etc. Your document may comprise of text, tables, and graphics. The graphics could be native drawings, vector graphics, or raster images. You can use various formatting options, including fonts and colors. Even though the prevalent method involves using a WYSIWYIG editor, like Microsoft Word, but for technical and complicated projects, you may use markup languages, like XML, HTML, or TeX.

2. Rendering

In this stage, your prepared native or markup document is converted into a high-fidelity printable format, like PDF. Applications like InDesign and Word have an integrated support for this. But if you prepare your book in XML, you have to use a browser or an application like PDFreactor, PrinceXML, or Apache FOP to render the document.
For me, the ideal solution would be to use XHTML and CSS for content and presentation, MATHML for mathematical formulas, SVG for vector graphics, JavaScript for dynamic processing, and Google Chrome for rendering. The problem is that HTML and CSS are not yet fully equipped for dealing with paged media. The W3C proposal for CSS Paged Media is not yet complete and is not fully supported in browsers.

This is a very extensive topic and I will write more about this in future posts.
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