In the "olden days" when I created documents on a typewriter, CRC was
routinely "shot down" because typewriter text was large and ungainly and
illustrations that weren't necessarily perfect were enhanced by reduction.
In those days, graphs, drawings, photographs, etc., had to be pasted up on
the CRC. If you'd ever visited a newspaper or an ad agency, you would have
seen people "making up pages" in this way. Creating a document using page
layout software (or even word processing software such as Word) is
exponentially easier than it was in those days!

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"C Tate" wrote in message
...
Thank you both very much indeed for such helpful replies. Is there
anything
I can refer to to learn even more about this? (It sounds like just making
sure your document is perfect for the camera though there are sometimes
other considerations such as the CRC being a fixed percentage larger than
the ultimate output).

"Jay Freedman" wrote in message
...
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