MasterPage

What is MasterPage?

MasterPage is a high-speed full-capability book publishing product. It is part of PubLink’s DeskTopPro family of products and is included in every system. This batch pagination program produces fully made-up pages in a matter of seconds. It is a multi-user program offering great speed and real flexibility. MasterPage and its predecessors have been the leading producer of books throughout North America from the late 1970’s into the late 1990’s, and remains the industry standard.

Why batch pagination?

Batch or hands-off pagination has always been the fastest method to produce pages which lend themselves to an automated process. Batch is preferred where the following criteria exist:

• Pages flow sequentially from front to back.
• Pages are grouped into chapters, articles, or similar groupings.
• Pages have a limited number of styles, usually a chapter page style as well as styles for left and right hand pages.

Interactive pagination is best used for most magazines, brochures, corporate communications and other types of work where the page design varies throughout the published product. PubLink offers DesignMaster for interactive makeup.

How Does Batch Pagination Work?

Master layouts are set up for each type of page. Layouts can include running heads and feet, with text fixed or drawn from page content, logo graphics, and trim marks. Rules are established for placement of illustrations and tables. Footnote styles are determined. Vertical spacing preferences are determined. Text breaking rules and heuristic controls are given. The text is then processed against these styles resulting in fully made-up pages within seconds.

What About Page Editing?

MasterPage operates with DeskTopPro’s DesignMaster and EditMaster modules. This allows pages to be interactively edited using EditMaster and remade interactively using DesignMaster’s wysiwyg page editing environment.

Publishing Candidates for Batch Pagination

MasterPage excels at the following types of publications:

• Medical and scientific journals
• Catalogs
• Technical manuals
• High school and college yearbooks
• Novels
• Directories
• Airline and train schedules
• Database publishing
• Legal books
• Accounting books
• Legislative and government publications

Some Features of MasterPage

With both batch and interactive capabilities, MasterPage exemplifies the best features of any page makeup system available in the marketplace today. The creation of page layouts for the chapter, even and odd pages follows the same process that is used in DesignMaster (our interactive page makeup partner), with its Mac-like feel, including areas set aside for automatic folios, running head and/or foot information. Fill out the easy-to-use pulldown menus for placements of footnotes (which includes the most comprehensive footnote placement options available), illustration integration and/or table placement. Click the mouse on the ”paginate” button and MasterPage creates the pages, fully paginated with folios, crossheads, footnotes, illustrations and tables, placed according to your guidance, automatically. Among its main features are:

• Chapter/Left/Right page design layout menus
• Multi-column settings of text (up to 9 text columns) with crossheads (over 2, 3, 4 etc. columns) on a page
• Automatic positioning of tables, math, illustrations, footnotes and sidenotes
• Running heads and feet supporting dual folios, extracted headings and continued lines
• Page break control according to content
• Copyfitting from a vertical spacing table, which is user specified
• Automatic rule and box generation
• Repagination of selected pages, where necessary, to achieve consistent page fit
• Efficient interactive page editor
• High speed processing
• Display of facing pages
• With the AutoTab option, floating tables that rotate and/or break from page to page as needed, with repeated table heads.

Is it right for XML content?

In conjunction with our XML Publisher XML formatter, MasterPage provides a page-creation engine that can become a nearly hands-off end-to-end system for generation of near-perfect pages from your XML content.