C Tate wrote:
Hope this doesn't seem a slightly off the wall question! But if
somebody asks for 'camera ready copy' in Word what exactly do they
mean?!!!!

In offset printing (the cheapest, easiest method), someone uses a press
camera to take a picture of each original page. Through several steps the
negative from that camera is used to make printing plates that apply ink to
sheets of paper. The original page is "camera ready" when it contains all
the text and graphics that should be in the final printing, and nothing
else. (Technically, since the film in the press camera is insensitive to
light blue, it's possible to write comments on camera ready pages with light
blue pencil. This is usually allowed only in the margins, though.) It means
a spell-check has been done, all corrections have been made, all fonts and
formatting are in place, headers and footers are included, etc.

This isn't exclusively a Word thing -- in fact, once you've used the
computer printer to put a Word document on paper, it doesn't matter whether
the pages came from Word or from Mars. In fact, I would never say that a
document is "camera ready" while it exists only as an electronic document.

The amount of work needed to convert camera ready copy into printing plates,
and the extra work and expense that may be needed to fix errors after that
stage, mean that you have to be very sure that everything is right before
you say the pages are "camera ready".

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org