Tailored typesetting
Quality and efficiency assured—from print products to cross-media content
With twenty years’ typesetting experience, there is hardly any challenge that we have not yet tackled and resolved. Specializing in scientific books and journals, we also typeset fictional content as well as works with demanding design requirements, and professionally implement the conversion of your manuscripts and data.
We process all standard file formats reliably and flexibly and can offer you expert advice on the best typesetting system. From Word and InDesign to TeX typesetting, we find the right solutions to realize your layout ideas and content requirements, while also meeting the technical demands. Whether producing individual works or setting up standardized processes to handle large production volumes, we realize your products with particular emphasis on technical and design quality.
In all typesetting systems, we use the options for fully or semi-automated processes for manuscript delivery, data normalization, and typesetting to ensure efficient processing and reliable quality.
Transparent scheduling is important to us. Production times are coordinated with the customer depending on priority, scope, manuscript quality, and layout. One of the particular strengths of le-tex is our ability to respond quickly to changes in customer priorities.
You have control of the whole package. Whether for publications with typographically complex typesetting that show their full potential in the printed version, or for cross-media data, we supply online PDFs, XML, and EPUBs in addition to print data, regardless of the typesetting system chosen.
Our typesetting systems
Over the years, our Word typesetting department has developed towards prepress for subsequent typesetting systems. With powerful VBA and Ruby-based scripts, typographic and stylistic requirements are incorporated into the texts, and links and formal markups implemented according to the publisher’s requirements. Data interfaces for Struki, copy editing, and for other typesetting systems are an integral prepress component. Finalizing of Word data up to the print data stage, author consulting in Word, and reconversion from XML are essential elements of our portfolio.
Naturally, TeX and InDesign features are continually enhanced and refined for efficient preparation of your content with regard to typography and structure, so that your product fully benefits from the strengths of each typesetting system.
TeX is used not only for works with extensive math content, but also for automated typesetting from XML data. It allows efficient typesetting of standardized layouts. Another useful feature of TeX is the fact that it allows layout-specific rules to be programmed with far more differentiation than, for example, InDesign. This enables rapid, smooth conversion of even the most complex typography.
Where InDesign comes into its own is for projects with special design requirements. Complex XML workflows including math typesetting can also be handled in InDesign by using transpect.
Accessibility
We take into account the accessibility requirements of publications as early as the typesetting stage. Using scripts and our own checking tools, we ensure that the technical requirements for PDFs and EPUBs are met.
We also work closely with the Daisy Consortium and the German Center for Accessible Reading, the monitoring body for accessibility of information technology in the Free State of Saxony.
Math typesetting
TeX is one of the most sophisticated typesetting systems used by publishers, researchers and developers around the world, particularly for scientific and mathematical publications. Regular expressions allow standardized formatting of math content in text-based typesetting, across multiple documents if necessary. Rendered equation image files can also be supplied in various other formats in addition to MathML in our XML workflows.
We are able to harness the benefits of TeX as a typesetting program for math content in our InDesign projects, using a combination of transpect workflow and TeX typesetting. MathML math content is converted to TeX, formatted, and then output as EPS. These equation image files can be easily integrated in the rough page makeup during IDML synthesis. TeX math content can be effortlessly converted back to MathML, which replaces the EPS images in fulltext on conversion to XML. This allows the production of large works with a high proportion of math content and excellent typesetting quality. Alternatively, the math content can also be edited directly in InDesign with the MathType plugin.
Overview of services
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Expert Word typesetting of books, journals, and proceedings
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Efficient typesetting of scientific and mathematical publications with extensive math content with LaTeX and from XML
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Typesetting of custom layouts and standardized (XML) production in InDesign
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Development and adaptation of templates
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Consulting for authors and publishers
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Markup of manuscripts for typesetting and XML workflows
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Conversion of raw data to other formats for appropriate processing