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A Printer's Rant

Let others rave and rant about what they will, Digitalnun has a bugbear of her own: printing. One of the downsides of the proliferation of computers and applications is that most people seem to think there is "nothing to it". A quick bash in Word, or a dip into Publisher, and there you are: a document that can easily be turned into print and look wonderful into the bargain. Alas, dear reader, no. If you are Enlightened and use a Mac, the chances are that you can produce something that will look quite good and which, with a bit of professional tweaking, can be made to look even better; but if you are serious about printing, you will have to start thinking about the principles of design and the technicalities of the printing process.

So, before you send me your book and tell me to print it "just as it is", please consider this. When we set out to design a book we begin with pencil and paper, protractor and set square, and map out the page size, text block and margins. We think about the typeface (note the singular: a mark of bad design is an abundance of typefaces spattered across the page), the illustrations, the kind of paper to be used and the colour of the ink (black inks differ from one another and change appearance depending what they are printed on). Above all, we think about the content and how it will be used.

We look at the illustrations and the screening, correcting tints in photographs, cropping and enhancing. We check for things like transparency; change to vector art where appropriate; make sure that everything will output as it should. This takes time, and the equipment used is expensive. Quite often, trying to put right what others did wrong takes longer than starting afresh, but it is difficult to convince people of this, so we do not always try; although Digitalnun is usually patient about explaining why things that look marvellous on screen can look disappointing on the printed page. It can be very hard work.

Why do we bother? Printing is one of the invisible arts: you will know when it is well done because nothing will jar, nothing will scream at you, "look at me! me! me!" There is an integrity about the well-printed page that sits well with monastic life. For fifteen hundred years Benedictine monks and nuns have worked with words: writing them, printing them, digitizing them. The internet is opening up even more opportunities for allowing words to speak eloquently to us. It is worth taking trouble about them.