Salt Lake City

Many writers have specialties: mystery, romance, true crime, even vampires. But Lisa Pulitzer has developed a curious subgenre that she has nearly all to herself: the escape story.

Ms. Pulitzer specializes in writing books with women who have abandoned groups that include, from left, a polygamous sect, a vehemently anti-homosexual Baptist church and the Church of Scientology.

Ms. Pulitzer helps young women who have fled religious sects or cultlike organizations give their accounts in compelling, often best-selling prose. “I’m now the official cult gal,” she said.

The chatter coming from the industry near the end of last year was that 2011 would be when mobile card acceptance and payments finally emerge as legitimate experiences for consumers and merchants in the United States. That proved to be partly true. Companies such as Square Inc. and Starbucks Corp. made waves in the market without relying on Near Field Communication, which some say is necessary for mobile payments to emerge on a wide scale. Google Inc. launched its wallet, albeit in a limited rollout. Isis gained pivotal partnerships with key industry players but has yet to test its

Now that electronic readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook have been on the market for a few years, long enough to become cheaper and more ubiquitous than ever, it’s no wonder that e-books have proliferated like mad.

Earlier this year, Amazon reported that its e-books for the Kindle were outselling regular books on its website, and Barnes & Noble shared the perhaps depressing news (for brick and mortar booksellers, anyway) that it sells three times as many e-books on BN.com as it does all categories of physical books combined.

Maybe we have an answer to all our prepress problems. It's called PDF. That's short for Portable Document Format. It's Adobe's file format. It's not difficult to grasp the basic principles of what PDF is all about. But it takes more than the page I have here, so please go read our related stories, then come back. All done? Good. (OK, for those of you who hate to flip pages, you should at least know that a PDF file can be made from a PostScript file. PostScript is the final format of a file made with Adobe's PageMaker or Illustrator programs and Quark's QuarkXPress, among others.) So, you