Monday 2 March 2015

The MYTH of QUALITY in Tamil comics

Re Re Re prints: The last post was about the quality about translation. This one is all about printing.

BTW, I had no intention of buying these forgot-how-many-times-re-printed books. but for my father, i would have given them a sure shot miss. he insisted that we buy these books. on that note, i bought.
Book 1: johnny nero story

just see the QUALITY or lack of it. The printing was such that there is no need to go to the next page or previous page i.e. we can read them in the same page.

for example, here is a scan of pages 8 & 9. By virtue of such fantastic printing quality, i can read page no 7 and page no 10 in these pages itself.  i believe this is a task to make sure that we read the 120 page book by reading only 60+ pages and thereby saving our precious little time.


if you believe that this is an error and only happened in one such book, have a look into the second book i bought and this is the sample from the second book.

There are certain things that do happen in multiples: disasters are sure to rank high in this list. to make sure that i am not biased, i bought the same book  again (via my uncle who visited chennai last week). The good thing was that he got 10% discount in a book shop in chennai, whereas you get nothing when you buy it from the publisher himself.


The 3rd and 4th book were also of the same quality. the above is the scan from the 3rd book that wasted. For some time i wondered that, OK, these printing errors do happen only in the first 2 sets of forms. (Forms are nothing but a section of 16 pages).

however, when i looked in to the entire book, the printing standards were maintained with the same consistency. Here i take the opportunity to congratulate our publisher for maintaining the same printing standards across 4 books (2 were bought from the publisher themselves and the remaining 2 in a chennai book shop).


Error 2: Corel-draw Lines

There are certain things that communicate absolute lack of responsibility. Of late, my beloved publisher is falling into the same vicious circle. Take a look at the following image



in the above scan, take a closer look at the speech balloon and the message box. you will see clear lines in each of them. Now, when you are typing in Tamil in these images using corel draw, you will use these circles inside the balloons and the boxes.

But it is mandatory to erase them once you have typed it and checked for errors. However in almost every alternate page, i can see that these corel draw lines were left un deleted. This shows absolutely no respect for the reader and almost borders on arrogance that whatever i print, you habe no choice but to buy.

Also, i believe, that this shows the level of responsibility that the publisher takes. No offense meant as he often says, once i print these books, i - myself - do not look at them.

Also, there are certain places in which the old text was not completely erased (more on that is reserved for a later day  post).

Make no mistake, if there is a deserved praise, i shall be the first one to make sure it reaches the right people, as well as making sure that no wrong accusation is also made. Not sure about my claim, read my first post.

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