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

computer tool logosWe 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

sample imageOur 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. 

 
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