We are a production asset
Signum Ops is a brand, specifically an imprint. In 2005 we published a
book with a very limited target audience and printed several thousand
copies in cooperation with another author. As the book was nearing
completion it became apparent that there were a number of other
individuals who had similar material to add to the book market and we
decided that we could assist them as well. Signum Ops has maintained itself as the banner for these books for more
than eight years. However: we no longer accept projects as
joint ventures. We will produce a book for you as a
work-for-hire. You own the product entirely, and are responsible
for maintaining your own account with your POD production house.
If you have a book ready for production, we are here to take care of
proofing, formatting, indexing, image processing,
cartography, graphics and so forth. Authors are busy building the material: we do the
packaging work. Working together, we get the job done.
What we do have that our clients do not have is the training,
experience and relevant hardware/software plant to output their material
in the form necessary to exploit today's digital market. With more than
twenty-five years of programming and software production experience we
have embraced the newest means of publication at the desktop level.
Where required, we can make use of GIS to assist in cartographic elements
of a book, build databases to output tables at the print level, employ
CAD to set up covers and illustrations, and build scripts and programs
to perform other complicated tasks that might be involved with any
potential publication.
Our Resources
We can accept printed material in Microsoft
Word format, PDF format, ASCII text format, or any other word processing
file form, including RAW image if necessary. If you have your manuscript
on paper in typewritten form, we can process that as well using OCR. We
have produced a number of books using straight image scans that were
subsequently typed into a word processor, or, scanned into OCR file
outputs.
Signum Ops also makes use of the latest image processing software to
develop grayscale and color images suitable for publication. Generally,
all books are built in color first and a proof in grayscale is then sent
to the printer. Once the proof is examined, images are processed as
needed for a final production print. We have a large bed scanner and 35
mm film/negative scanner in our studio. You can furnish photos,
negatives, slides, or contact sheets for inclusion in your book.
Our studio can convert vector to raster, or raster to vector, using
several software suites we have on hand, and we commonly deal with
conversions of many graphic file types including DXF, GeoTIFF, jpeg2000,
ECW and MrSid compressed imagery, metafiles and custom fonts. We use
custom software to rectify aerials and old maps to modern map layouts,
and have harnessed the ProLat.DLL to several programs so that we may
produce map graphics from disparate projections.
We can convert or directly make use of a number of common database file
formats, including Ms Sql, Geodatabase, CSV, DBF, and Access. If you
have data in tabular form, we can use VB.Net to build parsing routines
that will export directly to Access for final print production
regardless of field complexity.
Library
Our library contains hundreds of
out-of-print books dealing with the topics of treasure, treasure
hunting, marine salvage, archaeological reports, monographs, photos,
maps, circulars, techno-manuals and the like. We have invested heavily
in many collectible editions spanning decades of publication. We have
original maps, many sets of rectified aerials in digital format,
original print photos, and eBook format classics of the genre. All of
these resources are used in the business. You can browse some of our
book titles
here.
The Old Wreck Mashup
The old Wrecker Web Mashup featuring the locations of some of the sites in a few of our books can be found here. You need the latest version of Flash for the page to work properly and there have been some problems with Internet Explorer. Seems to work just fine with the Chrome browser from Google.
The KIC File
The KIC document located in the Vero Public Library can be found here reconstructed in an interactive, online help-file format.