Professional-looking publishing from desktop computers - Management of HR Systems

HR Magazine, June, 1993 by Charlotte LeGates

The second hardware problem occurs when you try to use "bleeds," a technique in which bars or photos run off the edge of the paper. You can create bleeds using PageMaker, but your office printer is incapable of printing them.

To overcome these problems, and avoid buying an expensive laser printer, send the publication on diskette or via a modem to a service bureau that prints hard copy or creates film. In urban areas, you can easily get a 24-hour turnaround time at modest per-page charges. You then send the copies or film to a professional printer, as with any other publication job.

If you must print on in-house copying equipment, you will want to experiment to discover the largest area on the page and the largest type size your equipment can handle without losing quality. You can get highly professional-looking results with in-house copying, but you will have to accept a few design limitations.

Other product limitations are mere quibbles. You can't mix horizontal and vertical pages in the same publication. Tabloid-size publications can print on 8 1/2" x 11" paper using the "tiling" feature, but it has to be pasted together.

Caution

Equipment. In theory, PageMaker will run on a wide variety of computer sizes, but it is inadvisable to attempt it with hard-drive storage much less than 200 megabytes. By the time the word-processing program is loaded on the same PC and fonts and long documents are added, you will find you need the extra disk space and speed of the larger drive to keep printing and response times within reason.

In addition, you need a laser printer. If you can't afford one, stick to word processing.

Personnel. Desktop publishing programs are powerful tools. They are not difficult to learn and use, but they are complex. They contain scores of tools and techniques that are easy to forget unless you use them several times a week.

Thus, it is unwise to assign desktop publishing to a secretary who is going to use it once a month. If use is that occasional, you need to join forces with another department also in need of desktop publishing to share a skilled operator. Or contract with a local freelancer or small design firm that will desktop publish your newsletter for a set-up fee plus a usually modest per-page charge.

An HR department with important ongoing publications like newsletters or training manuals should consider assigning desktop-publishing responsibilities to the person writing or editing the publication. Why? As in all project management, you get the best results when the person most committed to the publication has full responsibility and as much control as feasible.

Even more important, an understanding of the tools available for emphasizing points and creating common formats will help the writer plan the presentation of material. Manuals, for instance, need carefully planned interactions between graphic techniques and text to draw attention to important information. Only a writer or editor who is thinking graphically or working closely with a designer can achieve the optimal result.