Services

As a pure service company, le-tex provides corporate services in the prepress and publishing sector.

The key services are:

• Production editing of books (requirements management; project coordination and costing; supporting book projects from author manuscript to delivery stage; data checking in different phases); 
• Typesetting of books and journals; 
• Data conversion, e.g. for eBooks in EPUB format; 
• Consulting and development, particularly with regard to structured data and production workflows. 

These services may be requested individually or in combination.

Secondary services

The following services are mostly provided in connection with a typesetting job:

• Copy editing 
• Proofreading 
• Image processing 

Data enhancement

When customers commission the preparation of author manuscripts that are approaching the printing stage (in particular PDFs), they primarily do so in combination wtih production editing jobs. The data is adapted to the customer's technical standards using tools such as Adobe Acrobat and Enfocus PitStop. Reliable standards and tools are now available for creating and checking print data. However, many publishers have realized that communicating the details of these standards and tools to authors and then still having to compensate for printing malfunctions is more expensive than employing a specialist service provider to reliably ensure consistent quality of print data. The flurry of enthusiasm 10 years ago over camera-ready data prepared by the author has now largely evaporated for this very reason.

Similar realizations have affected the way that reusability and media-neutral archiving of content are handled. Nowadays, only a very small number of authors (usually IT specialists) can be expected to deliver their data in valid XML according to DocBook, Springer A++, WileyML or another complex DTD with several hundred different elements. The task of correct markup and conversion is frequently undertaken by a service provider.

Overall package

le-tex can cover all production editing and prepress services – either individually or as part of a package. To do this, it uses tools for modeling and controlling workflows in line with standards and requirements.