What is Desktop Publishing (DTP)?
You have designed your current content and its features with a certain audience in mind. And while you will probably know this audience pretty well, you may need expert insight into what your target locale(s) would find visually appealing. This is where Desktop Publishing (DTP) comes in.
DTP-Experts are an invaluable asset when the presentation and formatting of your visual features. Visuals, you may know, are almost as important as the content. Or perhaps even more so. Think about it. When you visit a poorly designed page or are holding a brochure where the colors and images are not well-aligned, this company will not inspire a lot of trust in you.
But other than making sure your visual materials appeal to local audiences, DTP-Experts also make sure that formatting issues are fixed. If you have a formal document, for example, the DTP-Team will make sure that the format of your document is the exact same when translated.
This is DTP-Professionals work with a DTP Toolbox that includes:
- Offering reference documentation that helps our DTP specialists automate some part of the process and reduce the manual formatting work, which saves both time and money.
- Securing a manual for technically complex projects. For example, when the source and target language have two different text directions, the Toolkit offers input on terms that are good to use, document formatting, text and image flipping and text alignment.
Don’t worry if it is still a bit confusing, we will dig deeper into the specific tasks handled by DTP-Professionals!
The DTP-Professional’s Expertise In A Nutshell
DTP-Professionals are highly trained in respecting the detail of a product and know how to address cultural variances that will uphold the visual potency of your materials in the global market. The DTP-Expert’s job includes:
- Selecting the right font for the right language. That’s right, there is no one font that fits all! Height, style, diacritical marks, and other details will need to be taken into account when selecting the right font for each language.
- Offering recommendations for best practices on the impact your graphical layout will have and if it fits the context of country-specific standards.
- Formatting complex languages and characters. Imagine you want to localize an e-Learning course in Storyline. While Storyline has some very useful features that can aid the localization process, it doesn’t yet, for example, support right to left (RTL) languages such as Hebrew, Farsi and Arabic. Asian languages such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, on the other hands, are read in columns from top to bottom. Although there are some regular expression that could be used to fix the bi-di, or bidirectional, issues, these can’t be applied globally. That is why you will need professional DTP-Experts to take the formatting into their own hands. If there are issues involved that will require heavy coding, the localization engineers will take over!
More information
Read more about Storyline Localization and the role of DTP-Experts
