Doug asks:

> While this lack of integration is frustrating, the problem remains: How =
>  can someone submit their electronically formatted books to the printing =
>  house most efficiently and retain the attributes?

What attributes do you want to retain?

We have several times given serious consideration to self-publishing
technical manuals by going to the book manufacturer ourself. What we did was
find the best technical manuals we could, the ones that look the nicest,
published by organizations such as Adobe Press, Microsoft Press, John Wiley &
Sons, and Academic Press. I then called each one of the publishing houses and
found out where they had their books manufactured. In every instance, the
manufacturer (the printer) of the books was R.R. Donnelly.

Based on that information, I flew to the nearest Donnelly site, which was
right next to the airport in Irvine, CA, talked with them, and found out what
they needed.

What they required was very, very simple. All they needed was good clean
paper copy of every page. They would photograph it, make a plate of the page,
and then print the book. PDF was totally acceptable. (All of this was before
direct PDF-to-plate hardware was available, so now even the camera step can
be eliminated.)

A minimum run of 5000 books was going to cost only about $4500 -- for exactly
the same quality of manual as the Adobe Postscript books (the blue, red, and
green books). I was very impressed with how easy it was to self-publish.

In the end, we decided not to do it, simply because (i) the HP3000 market is
too small for the minimum runs, (ii) our software was evolving too quickly
and (iii) old manuals have no value, thus there was going to be a substantial
amount of waste in the process, but I was very impressed with how easy it was
to self-publish, creating a series of books very much akin to Microsoft Press
that will look absolutely as good.

Wirt Atmar