POD localization and targeting pubs for reproduction; was: Re: recommendations for Print on Demand vendors

[David Neeley <dbneeley -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Stephen--

Another facet you may wish to consider: if you have substantial user 
base outside the U.S., you might seriously consider finding POD 
resources abroad. For instance, if you have customers in the E.U., 
having a vendor there will lower the costs and response time for them. 
This is more convenient for your customers, of course, and it also may 
increase the use of your printed docs correspondingly.

If you also happen to have docs in various languages, that is a natural 
as well--to have the localized docs available locally as well.

I am somewhat familiar with POD regarding fiction and trade paperback 
nonfiction, but unfortunately I've never been involved with any of them 
for tech docs. A major concern of mine would be whether any of your docs 
need to have color reproduction of any illustrations; secondarily, 
whether any graphics are produced with an eye toward how well they might 
reproduce in a monochrome Xerographic medium.

As you are aware, various colors can easily reproduce as similar shades 
of gray when printed in black and white; this can result in 
unfortunately difficult to use graphical figures.

Thus, I believe best practices would indicate that when you are 
targeting this kind of reproduction you should carefully assess your 
graphics, increasing contrast where necessary to be sure the output is 
useful to the customer. In some cases, this can be somewhat of a PITP 
(pain in the posterior), it can make a huge difference in the resulting 
document's usefulness.

In those cases where the product itself may have serious impact on 
health and safety (which I presume your products may?), striving for 
maximum clarity would certainly seem to be significant in this regard.

David

On 03/15/2011 07:55 AM, techwr-l-request -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com wrote: