Over the past year, ICC Macmillan has successfully implemented a new workflow to adjust to the changing demands of the publishing industry. We now offer a service we call Direct-to-India, or DTI. With DTI, publishers can bypass the Portland office and work directly with our co-workers in India, thereby saving time. We have a fully trained and operational project management division in India, staffed by employees who have earned degrees in publishing or English, who have been through a rigorous year-long training process, and who understand the ins and outs of educational publishing. (See related story on our customer service staff in Delhi, page 3. ) Many of our clients are now requesting this service, with excel- lent results.

So, how does DTI work? If you have a project you’d like to send to ICC Macmillan and are interested in trying out DTI, contact your sales account manager (based here in Portland). An Indian project manager will be assigned and will contact you.

Next, all materials can be shipped via courier or posted via FTP or e-mail to our office in Delhi. From that point onward, it’s business as usual—you will receive a file evaluation, castoff, bid or confirmation of an estimate, and regular status reports. Proofs can either be posted on your FTP site for review or shipped in the mail. All contact between ICC Macmillan, the publisher, the author, and the printer goes through our Indian office. However, there is always staff in Portland to help out when necessary.

Here are a few frequently asked questions:

Q. Will my copyedit be handled by a native English speaker?
A. Yes. Editing, editorial proofreading, and indexing are handled domestically by native English speakers. We are researching offshore possibilities, but will alert clients if any changes are made to this policy.

Q. What if I need a same-day response to a query?
A. We advise that you determine if an immediate reply is necessary. If so, we have staff in Portland who can assist with any urgent concerns or issues.

Q. How do I have a conference call when the author, the project manager, and the editor are all in different time zones?
A. Your project manager can arrange to be available at a convenient time. There will never be a need for you to wake up at 2 a.m.to discuss work!

Q. Can I request domestic project management and offshore composition?
A. Sure—you will always have the option for Portland-based management;the composition will always be handled offshore, as it has been for the past twenty years.

If you are interested in hearing more about DTI or would like to submit a project to ICC Macmillan, please contact your sales account manager (Kerry Beeaker or Gina Gordon at 503-221-9911) to guide you through the process.

QuarkXPress has been the leading desktop publishing application for serious publishing for nearly as long as there has been desktop publishing. Now the publishing world is being stood on its head by demands for “XML this, ”“math that, ”—new figure features that require native file formats from Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Is Quark keeping up? Longtime users tremble in fear.


Rival Adobe, the company that invented Postscript along with Photoshop and Illustrator— and which acquired PageMaker and FrameMaker along the way— invented InDesign “from the ground up.”

InDesign version 1.0 was easy to ignore. It was an ambitious first step with highly refined typographic functions, but basic features were lacking, which led many people to conclude that it was nearly impossible for InDesign to produce suitable output by high-resolution imagesetters—the gold standard of the publishing industry.

When InDesign 2.0 came out people began to take notice. Here was a product with just a few new features, but more importantly, it eliminated most of the bugs. As a bonus Adobe enabled installation under both Macintosh Classic and OS X operating systems. Meanwhile Quark had released version 5.0.Still working only in Macintosh Classic mode, it exhibited so few new features that nearly every composition house stayed with tried and true Quark 4.11, which had been released in 1995.

Now we have InDesign CS with native Macintosh OS X programming, OpenType font support, and native support for Adobe’s flagship image applications, Photoshop and Illustrator. Indeed, integration of the three applications is so tight that Adobe released them together as the Creative Suite (hence CS). Many months later Quark finally released the OS X compatible version 6.0 (now at v.6.5).With this new release Quark joins the OS X family, but not whole heartedly. Through a free extension, native Photoshop files are supported, but not native Illustrator files. Still missing is OpenType support. Briefly, OpenType is a format jointly developed by Adobe and Microsoft. It is largely PostScript compatible, but is capable of supporting much a larger set of type characters—or “glyphs. ”On a single font it is possible to have Roman, Greek, and Cyrillic character sets with room left over for oldstyle numbers and alternate swash letters. A bonus is that this font is completely compatible with both Macintosh and Windows operating systems. Quark’s support for OpenType is limited to the first 256 characters, which match a PostScript font.

Even as dedicated QuarkXPress users, ICC Macmillan is not sitting this one out. We don’t see this race as a winner-take-all derby. Having two powerful desktop publishing applications will benefit both in the long run. We are putting resources into InDesign because we respect the progress Adobe has made in its development of the product, and because you—our customers—have also noticed it’s out there and is capable of giving you the quality you require with a higher degree of flexibility in creating competitive designs.