Adobe Creative Suite Shows Up On a Lonely Planet

Well-known travel guide publisher and information provider standardizes on Adobe Creative Suite, InDesign

Lonely Planet is a pur­vey­or of trav­el infor­ma­tion known world wide, with prod­ucts rang­ing from pocket-size guide­books to activ­i­ty books and phrase­books that are sold the world over. And, on 30 January 2006, accord­ing to Adobe, it has stan­dard­ized its over 500 titles on a Creative Suite and InDesign solu­tion to stream­line pub­lish­ing and increase efficiency.

According to Andrew Tudor, pro­duc­tion ser­vices man­ag­er for Lonely Planet, as quot­ed by Adobe:

InDesign has improved our pub­lish­ing efforts dra­mat­i­cal­ly. It is less expen­sive because it pro­vides glob­al typo­graph­i­cal capa­bil­i­ties in a sin­gle prod­uct with­out requir­ing spe­cial ver­sions of page lay­out soft­ware and pro­vides robust Visual Basic script­ing for automa­tion and cus­tomiza­tion. Asian lan­guage guide­books, for instance, have tra­di­tion­al­ly been among the most chal­leng­ing titles we pro­duce. Thanks in no small part to sup­port for Unicode in InDesign, we can pub­lish these titles sev­er­al weeks faster—a breeze in com­par­i­son to past efforts.

Adventures in Adventure Books

The media is pub­lished in five lan­guages, includ­ing Japanese and Korean. Production of the books involves the man­ag­ment of over 50 font sets, pro­duc­ing com­comi­tant prob­lems in text flow and lay­out. However, Adobe’s sup­port of Unicode and OpenType allows Lonely Planet to import those com­plex scripts as text in the doc­u­ments, direct­ly editable. Formerly, they would have to go back to the orig­i­nal scripts to regen­er­ate the lay­outs. InDesign’s native multi-language capa­bil­i­ties, pro­vid­ed with­out hav­ing to pur­chase a dif­fer­ent ver­sion of the appli­ca­tion, stream­lines poly­glot pub­li­ca­tion processes.

InDesign CS’s sup­port of Visual Basic script­ing also helps them auto­mate tedious process­es. They have also adopt­ed PDFs for com­mu­ni­ca­tion and proof­ing, increas­ing accu­ra­cy and enabling increased ease of com­mu­ni­ca­tions between the pub­lish­er and thi­er writ­ers, who can be at large lit­er­al­ly anywhere.

Lonely Planet joins such pub­lish­ers and agen­cies as Hearst Magazines, Ogilvy and Mather, REI, and Staples.

Read Adobe’s press release here.