3.8 Completion of the Technical Report
3.8.3 Creating and Printing the Copy Originals and End Check
The text, tables andfigures are ready now. You have proofread the drafts and eventually gave them to other people for proofreading. The corrections are inserted and the final printout could start now.
However, before you start with that, you should call your copy-shop and announce your copy order. Tell them, how many copies are to be made and when you will bring the copy originals. Besides, you should ask how long it lasts to create the bindings (cold
Accept and analyse the task
Check or create the title
Design a 4-point- structure
Design a 10-point- structure
Create text, figures, tables
Develop detailed structure Search, Read, Cite literature
Proofread and enter correc- tions
Print ori- ginals or PDF/end check
Copy, bind and distribute report
Fig. 3.31 Network plan for the creation of Technical Reports: printing originals or PDF and end check
adhesive bindings need 1 day to dry). If you have arranged the copying of larger works or larger print runs with the copy-shop, you can start to create the copy originals. In the network plan, this is the second last phase of creating the Technical Report (Fig.3.31).
While you can use nearly any paper for drafts, you want to get as high-class copy originals as possible. High-class means, that the copy originals should be rich in contrast.
That means at first, that the printing paper should be pure white. That is also valid for figures, which are copied from another source and integrated into your report. In addition, the paper shall not shine through. Therefore, you should use paper with a mass of unit area of 80 g/m2.
For ink jet printers you should use as smooth paper as possible, eventually even special paper. If you want to integrate a few copied pages into your report or glue-in copied figures, you should use the same paper for these purposes. That means that you shouldfill the copier with your own paper, if necessary. Do not use pure white paper in your own printer and ecological or recycling paper in the copier. This would result in an avoidable inconsistent impression. Color copies may be on different paper, because you normally cannot influence the paper quality for these copiers.
Manually drawnfigures (freehand drawings or drawn with rulers and stencils) appear especially pretty and rich of contrast, if you draw them larger and reduce them with the copier. Small irregularities and blurs disappear. The lines appear much sharper.
The importance of manual drawing declines, but compared with using graphics and CAD programs it still has a certain significance. The phases “creative sketching” and
“drawing ready for printing”seamlessly merge when drawing with a drop action pencil and you can rub out errors easily. The copier gets out additional contrast, if you use pure white paper and a high contrast setting. Especially, if you run out of time towards the end of your project, you should seriously check this alternative. In addition, in our experience you can concentrate on drawing with few errors after many hours and late at night better, if you are working manually. With the computer you have quickly pressed a button, you did not want to!
If copied or cut-outfigures or tables shall be glued in, always use drawing board and ruler. Clamp the paper and adjust the paper edge. Then lay thefigure loose on the paper.
Decide, whether the figures shall be arranged left justified, centered, or with a regular offset of a few centimeters from the left edge. Roughly, remember the figure position.
Then put as few glue as possible on the rear side of thefigure (e.g. only into the corners) and glue thefigure in. Now you can use the ruler to check whether thefigure is straight. If not, move it carefully. Twist-up adhesive stick (glue stick) is reliable. Compared with all-purpose glue it has the advantage, that you can use a knife to get off thefigures again, To adjust them at a new position or to use them in a different context.
The montage glue “Fixogum” has the advantage, that the figures can be removed (stripped off) very easily. You can even get off newspaper paper. However, this glue has the disadvantage, that after four or five years all figures that you have glued in become loose and that the paper gets yellow at the glue spots!
If you use transparency paper, the glue shines through (eventually copy the image or drawing from transparency paper to pure white paper and glue that in).
When copying, the edges of the glued infigures might be visible on the copies. Then you have two options: Change the contrast at the copier or—if the copies may not become brighter—cover the edges on the copy original with correctionfluid. You can also make a good, dark copy and cover the undesired edges with correction fluid there. Then this processed copy becomes the new copy original.
For all labels you want to write by hand and colored accentuations of different information (e.g. distinguishing the variants in the morphological box, colored underlining etc.) there are some rules for the selection of drawing pencils, if you do not use the color ink jet printer.
If you draw with felt pens, you can usually see the color also on the rear side. It is better to use text marker, pencil, colored pencil, ball pen and colored india ink. However, ball pens often“spit”(especially before the mina becomes empty) and create thick blurs at the beginning and end of the line, which dry out very slowly and which are therefore smeared very easily.
Refilled text markers also spit very often! India ink pencils create the most accurate results; but since you have to wait for any line that the ink is dried, they take a lot of patience.
Ink ball pens andfineliner pens are easy to handle and have an accurate result. Yet, you should try them out on scratch paper before you start withfinal writing or drawing.
The colors yellow, light brown, light green, light blue etc. are hard to copy with black-and-white copiers. In the copy, they are either ignored or displayed as very light gray. The colors dark blue, dark green, red etc. can be copied well. They are displayed as dark gray to black.
If only the master copy of the Technical Report shall get colored accentuations, then you should use strong, dark colors and different line styles on your copy originals. On all other copies but the master copy, the different black line styles are clearly distinguishable.
If you want to glue in labels into figures, you should leave at least two spare lines between the different labels on your paper printout. Then you cut out the labels and glue them into thefigures. The procedure is the same as described above for gluing infigures.
To glue in labels you should use Twist-up adhesive stick (glue stick). Liquid glues flow out at the sides of the narrow paper stripes and excessive glue, which has not been removed in time, glues together the copy original pages or is visible on the copies.
Figures and tables can be larger than DIN A4. This is called“swing-out”. Prepare a nearly empty page as copy original for such a picture or table (“carrier page”). On this carrier page, there are only the normal header with a running page number, eventually a footer and the figure subheading or table heading. The figure or table is created in an independentfile and printed out or copied (eventually on a color copier) or plotted as often as the number of copies of the final bound Technical Report.
After copying the Technical Report including the carrier page the swing-out is glued onto the carrier page. All left bending edges must be clearly out of the binding range. The
right and lower bending edges must have a distance offive (better ten) millimeters from the paper edge, since for some binding types after binding the document is cut with the hydraulic shear at the upper, right and lower edge, see thefigures in Sect.3.8.5.
If you have used a technical part or assembly from a manufacturer brochure in your design, it is better for the understanding of your readers to include the used brochure into an appendix of your Technical Report. If you do that, another step is recommended very much. Help your readers to quickly find the used formula, selected measure etc. by accentuating that in the brochure in the appendix with a text marker.
After allfigures and tables are glued in, all manually created labels are written and all correction steps are done the end check can follow:
Are the pages in the right order? Are they upright (page headers at the top)? Pages in landscape format lie correctly, if the upper page margin which is to be bound is on the left side in the pile of sheets and the pages can be read from the right. Have outdated printouts slipped-in? Go through the report checklist, Sect.3.8.1.
If everything is checked—and also the page numbers in the table of contents have been checked with the copy originals—you can go to the copy-shop.