Copyright 1997, Virginia Lawrence

There are two ways to prepare your book for the printing house:

Laser printout

Electronic files

Each of the two formats can produce varying levels of quality. For example, the quality of a book produced from laser printout depends mostly on the resolution of your laser printer. The quality of a book produced from electronic files depends on the resolution of the method used by the printer to make printing films or plates.

What do we mean by quality? A high-quality book has a resolution that is high enough to produce clear, well-defined letters in the text. A high-quality book also makes it easy for the reader to differentiate fine lines and small text in tables and graphics.

If your book contains only 10 point text or larger, you may not consider high-quality resolution to be an important factor. However, if your book has fine drawings or examples of screens for a software manual, using a high-resolution method will produce fully readable pages. In contrast, a low-resolution method resulting from laser printout will produce muddy graphics, possibly muddy enough to obscure important information.

How Can We Regulate Quality?

Your choice of book preparation method will determine the maximum quality of printing possible for your book. You choose to send your book to the printing house as laser printout or as electronic files.

There is one important fact to keep in mind while you are considering your choice of formats. Sending a book to a capable printer in an electronic format will always result in a book of higher quality than would be possible with a laser printout.

Laser Printout to Printing House

Self-publishing