Posted by shai on Jun 14, 2018; 2:38am
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/Am-I-missing-something-big-about-book-production-tp6365p6377.html

I considered using HTML and its print facilities but I'm not sure if that would produce the result I want especially with pagination and attention to details.

I did make some progress but I don't think publishers work this way because I couldn't find any evidence of that.

I opened the PDF file in Sketch which is an excellent commercial vector drawing tool. It's not great for print but I use it a lot (it's possible this is better in Adobe illustrator).

Anyway, it opens the PDF and you can just edit the text and reposition it just like you can in any Sketch drawing. It arranges the 440 pages as individual images you can go through one by one and "fix" the layout of each and everyone of them.

I doubt Sketch is used by production teams since there is no CMYK support there but I think it would be good enough for me since the printing will be black and white anyway (covers are produced separately). Because this is literally a drawing app I can position everything I want where I want it and it will look crisp because it's a vector drawing app. I hope I won't spend a week on this only to discover a huge pitfall but I think I found the answer. The one  problem I have now is rendering the document without the callouts so I can embed them manually into the code...