Book in Xara, Workflow Help?

Hello,

I have been out of the forums for a while and am glad to see so much helpful info here again.

I have a client coming on Thursday to begin work on a short book project. It is a collection of about 15 photographic images with some short text for each image. I have done CD covers and booklets in the past using Xara Extreme but never a book of about 30 pages. I was wondering if anyone had any tips for me on Xara workflow for short book projects? I know a lot of the answers to these questions will depend on the printer we use for the project but I am unsure about things like:

1. What is a standard page bleed size for most printer companies in Europe (maybe 0.3cm)?
2. Once I have the exact final page size from the client, can I just add the bleed to that size in the Page Options window in Xara? Do I need to add any other guides to the pages for the printer?
3. Has anyone found a good way to automate adding page numbers to a book in Xara?
4. Are there any other essential things I should be thinking about when working on a book that is going to print?

Thanks in advance.
Kurt

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1. What is a standard page bleed size for most printer companies in Europe (maybe 0.3cm)?

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Not sure about Europe but in New Mexico 1/8" is usually enough.

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2. Once I have the exact final page size from the client, can I just add the bleed to that size in the Page Options window in Xara? Do I need to add any other guides to the pages for the printer?

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Best to ask the printer. Each printer has different requirements.

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3. Has anyone found a good way to automate adding page numbers to a book in Xara?

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Nope. I would format your page number on one of the pages then use Arrange > Repeat on All Pages. Then you need to edit each separately. If you do this, do it towards the end of the process. If you use the Update Repeating Objects, all your pages numbers will get reset to the current page number. :eek:

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4. Are there any other essential things I should be thinking about when working on a book that is going to print?

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You will probably want to prepare the book for printing as a PDF file. You can specify the addition of printers marks in the Printer Options dialog (attachment). But check with your printer to see if this is necessary.

If you do include printer marks, crops, registration targets, etc., make sure your page size is the actual print size with bleed.

Other considerations are file size and Xara resource handling. If you are working with large pages and very high resolution photos, your system resources (memory) can get eaten up pretty quickly. Save your work often, and close all other programs. From time to time, close Xtreme and then reopen. Also from time to time, reboot your computer. This way you start out with more system resources at your disposal.

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Originally Posted by Kurt8

3. Has anyone found a good way to automate adding page numbers to a book in Xara?

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It is a mystery to me why Xara have not introduced a simple way to paginate in Xtreme.

After all, they do advertised (and introduce) it as being somewhat of a DTP tool.

Standard bleed in the UK in my experience has been 4mm double check with your printer of choice, also check with them re colour most in the UK will only touch cmyk and they also generally like the finished doc as a pdf as well.

I used to produce a local monthly community magazine a couple of years ago we used to print run 5000 a month what a lot of fun that was NOT!!!

Anyhow at risk of being flooged to death I am going to suggest that maybe you put all your graphics together in Xtreme then if you have Microsoft Office have a look at Publisher for actually putting the thing together it is designed for this sort of thing and is very user friendly and it does have things like automatic page numbering and header and footer inserts etc.

I have never really considered Xtreme for producing such things as magazines and books I must have a play some day.

Hope that helps

Chris

Hi Kurt,
With 15 images and text I'd definitely go with Xara. The ease of moving images around in and out of text is so much easier and intuitive.

For details I'd suggest to search the forum here. There is a lot of work on producing smallish text based projects but it is very scattered. 30 odd pages is easily within Xaras scope and if it is graphics rich then I would definitely consider this the way to go.

However, if the project could expand as these things sometimes do then I'd suggest at least thinking about going with a word processor package such as Word, Indesign or Serif. Their graphics capabilities are not the same as Xaras but in most cases you will probably be adding premade graphics and not drawing from scratch. What you would gain would be page numbering, headers footers, styles, automatic contents pages, better layout capabilities, etc etc and if it has lots of graphics (as in hundreds) then linking to the pictures makes the whole job much faster and less likely to clag.

For your project I'd say that if you know Xara well then go Xara. Sounds like a great little project. let us know how you get on.

Erik

Thanks so much for all of the feedback. I feel more confident now about this project. My client (a photographer) will be arriving with all of his images as high resolution TIFF files. He is a bit concerned about a loss of quality when importing them into Xara and the book. Is there anything I need to pay particular attention to when we import the images to make sure we are getting maximum quality? Also, we may have to make minor tweaks to the size of the pictures once the images are in Xara. Since the images will be within the vector space, such resizing tweaks will not change the quality, will they?

Thanks again.
Kurt

Looking at the VIEW tab under PAGE OPTIONS I am thinking I should probably check the box for "import at dpi specified in the image file", right?

Kurt

Gary,

I am doing a quick test run of your idea to use ARRANGE and REPEAT ON ALL PAGES to insert the page numbers. It is working fine, but I am laying the book out using a double page spread so the numbers are only repeating on the left side of the spread. Maybe I am going about this in the wrong way though and should not be using the double page? Since this is a book it just feels more natural to me to use the double page spread so as to keep an eye of the flow of the content on the left vs. the right page. Any thoughts?

Thanks.
Kurt