Generic Compositors, a division of Stonecrest Industries,
has been a provider of quality typography at competitive prices for almost
a decade. We are committed to the standards of quality and elegance established
in the nineteenth century, at prices that also harken back to that time.
We review kerning tables for each typeface in every project. We use ligatures,
true small caps, and oldstyle figures when called for. We can read and
implement complex designs.
Generic may not be unique—the development of PCs and software
such as Quark and Illustrator has spawned many new type houses—but
we believe we are among the best of the industry. Our balance of price
and schedule will satisfy your need for productivity; and our preoccupation
with quality demonstrates a professionalism that will satisfy your most
demanding author or marketplace.
Our market
Generic specializes in one-color books for academic and professional
trade markets published by university presses and commercial publishers.
These books, currently sold to libraries and professional bookstores,
will find a higher percentage of sales from electronic versions in the
future. To help you tap this market, we maintain secure archival storage
for all projects and we support their translation into HTML. Rather
than be concerned that electronic media are a threat to traditional
publishing, we consider them as evolutionary steps in information processing
and a way to increase the reading public. We can help you reach this
expanding market.
Our competition
Generic competes with both traditional phototypesetting houses and the
plethora of new desktop operations.
Like traditional typesetters, we create electronic files by keyboarding
and scanning as well as by converting author-generated disks. We also
create art and music and we lay out complex tables. Though our cost
and schedule performance are more akin to the practice of desktop operators,
our knowledge of publishing is broader and deeper. We won't deliver
first proofs filled with widows, hyphen stacks, rivers, letter spacing,
uneven spreads, or poorly placed art. We understand page layout and
we know how to put the elements together.
By matching the quality and professionalism of traditional compositors
with the price and speed of desktop operations, we offer you an ideal
opportunity to meet new challenges. And unlike both the old-line comp
house and the novice desktopper, we are an enthusiastic partner in the
electronic publishing process.
Other composition services
More publishers want to be editing on screen than have in-house personnel
and freelancers ready to take on the tasks of complex coding and layout
of tables and mathematics. We can work with a combination of your disks
for text and your hardcopy for math and tabular matter.
Or we can provide you with "double-spaced" galleys typeset to your
specifications, for your designer and production editor. Because we
never charge for alterations, you will be able to amend design elements,
edit more quickly and thoroughly, and review the material more completely
without financial penalty as your staff develops its electronic expertise.
Many projects require personalized fonts (e.g., special characters
like Greek breathing symbols). Traditionally, these special characters
required hand placement at significant cost. Now, we can provide your
books with customized letters or symbols at minimal cost.
Mathematics is a typesetting challenge—neither SGML nor Quark
allow for setting professional-quality mathematics. While TEX sets elegant
mathematics, TEX pages must be individually laid out and are very expensive.
To save you this expense, we are now a beta site for the integration
of TEX into Quark—we can provide TEX-quality math at a Quark price.
When you must increase capacity without committing to increased staff
or want to explore a new venture without long-term investment, consider
our full-service support. Rely on Generic's ten-year track record to
pick up your overload. Our management, with sixty years of inhouse publishing
experience, understands your needs; our quality-control staff ensures
that your standards will be maintained; and our book designers, editors,
proofreaders, and indexers are the best in the business.
Our marketing approach
Our market has been wonderfully supportive of Generic: we appeal to
potential clients based on schedule and price, and we continue to do
business with them based on our quality and professionalism. We rarely
are rejected in our initial approach and we don't lose clients often
to other sources.
We retain our clients through these essential steps:
- We train our people to Generic methods and standards. This training
effort continues and expands as new demands develop.
- Every project at Generic is scrutinized by our quality-control staff.
This effort is people-intensive and cannot be delegated to technology.
Quality control continues to be nurtured.
- A major challenge for any business is to balance growth and capacity—too
often a business goes after new clients at the expense of current
ones. At Generic, new business is solicited only when current clients
are satisfied.
- At Generic, we want customers who are more than merelysatisfied:
we want customers who are so pleased that they become advocates.
For further information, please email us, including your name, affiliation, and areas of interest,
and we will get back to you quickly.
