What is it?
The production of professional quality, print-ready materials using specialized software to design the layouts and templates. It has replaced manual typesetting and paste up as a discipline, and has evolved beyond desktop computers to include laptops, mobile devices, and the cloud.
Why is it important?
DTP software is used to produce most printed documentation in circulation. It can be 50% of the cost of a localization project, so if the source files are poorly internationalized, this task can break a company’s localization budget[Esselink, 2000]. Properly implemented XML or other structure can significantly reduce DTP costs, but you still need skilled designers to create the output templates.
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