Text Preparation Phase of Desktop Publishing

How a desktop published document is created

The text can take many forms. It may be supplied to the desktop publisher by a client or supervisor or the desktop publisher may create their own text. Text can be created in a word processor or directly in the desktop publishing application. Although presented step-by-step, desktop publishing is not an entirely linear progression. You'll find yourself going back and forth many times between tasks and between each phase.

Do the following tasks, as required. Text composition has many sub-tasks. Where available, find corresponding tutorials, exercises, or resources for further study.

1. Text aquisition
   Text acquisition is the method by which text is created (such as typing in a word processor) and imported into a desktop publishing application. Text can also be acquired in many different formats, each with its own pros and cons.
   Plain Text Files
   Rich Text Format (RTF)
   Tab Delimited Files
   Tagged Text Files
   

2. Text composition
   Text composition consists of many individual tasks regarding where and how text is arranged on the page and how the text is formated, including spacing, hyphenation, and type styles. This is perhaps the area of document creation that requires the most time and attention to detail.
   1. Placement/Alignment
   2. Size/Contrast/Emphasis
   3. Spacing
   4. Embellishment
   ^{TEXT COMPOSITION TUTORIALS}

   Although presented first, sometimes images are brought into the desktop publishing document before the text or during the text preparation phase. At whatever point it occurs, image acquisition and preparation involves additional tasks and may affect the overall text composition.

   Next Phase > Images

   _{The Desktop Document > Text Phase}