ISD offers professional typesetting, book design, and prepress services for scholarly and academic publishers.
Whether you are an established publisher looking to supplement your production capacity or a smaller press without dedicated production staff, ISD can help transform manuscripts into professionally designed, print-ready books. With decades of experience producing scholarly publications, we understand the unique demands of academic publishing, including complex references, multilingual text, illustrations, tables, indexes, and specialized fonts.
Our services are offered on a cost-recovery basis and can be tailored to the needs of each publisher and project.
Text
We typically provide basic copy-editing (catching the last typos and grammar issues) during the typesetting process. If necessary or requested, we can also provide advanced/heavy copy-editing options for manuscripts that have not been copy-edited prior to submission; this service can include reference checks, expository style suggestions, translations (from French, German, Dutch, Italian).
Once the main text portion of the book has been typeset, we generate front and back matter.
Illustrations
One of the first stages of our work is the checking and preparing of illustration files to be included in the books we typeset. We can work with a wide range of illustration formats, from rasterized image files to vector illustrations. Preliminary compliance checks compare the available image files with print specifications; if necessary, we can manipulate the files to comply with the printer’s specifications (for example, convert them to the proper color profile, resize and resample resolutions). If the image files have larger issues that we can not fix, we contact the authors/editors with suggestions about what they can do to fix their illustrations files.
Layout and Typesetting
We can work with any given template for the layout and look of a book, but we also provide book design from the ground up, attempting to give the volume a unified look that meshes well with and complements its subject area. In the latter case, we communicate closely with the authors/editors, to make sure that they like the look of the book and to present them with available layout options (inline images vs. figures section, color s, frontispiece, etc.) Book design services can also include cover design.
Typesetting of non-Latin fonts is no problem. For more common fonts, such as Greek, we use dedicated book fonts that include Greek, Cyrillic, and other language characters within their Unicode tables. Other languages, such as Coptic, Aramaic, or Hieratic, are typeset in specialized fonts that are selected to blend in as well as possible with the main text font. We can also generate and typeset Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Prepress
We prepare print-ready files (typically high-resolution PDFs) compliant with the printer’s technical specifications and in direct communication with the printer.
Interested? To contact us about typesetting & prepress services, please contact Susanne Wilhelm at susanne@isdistribution.com.