Typesetting Typesetting is the process of setting written material into type. Typesetting is how your book goes from a Microsoft Word document to the way it will look in the hands of your readers. There are three different kinds of typesetting in use today. And, before you ask, scanning isn t one of them. It s tempting because it s so cheap, and it s fine for art, but it s not good enough for text.
Characters are too hard to differentiate.
At iPublish, we do some scanning, but only if there s no other alternative. Sometimes a book is out of print, and the original files are unobtainable. Sometimes the author is dead, or the book was originally written on a typewriter, or in a word-processing program that can t be converted to Microsoft Word. Computers have completely replaced the incredibly complex and expensive typesetting machines of yesteryear. In most cases, our typesetting is done from the author s original disk.