A recent post at Heaneyland!, whose last few offerings had me gasping in great honks of laughter for more than a minute, reminds me that I’d like to make a qualified recommendation of the electronic version of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, aka the default dictionary of U.S. book publishing.

Recommended because it’s the default dictionary, and if you do anything related to book editing or production you should be in the habit of looking stuff up in it, and if you must look stuff up, it’s a lot faster to do so right on your computer than to have to get up from your desk, drag down the dead-tree version of what’s probably the previous edition of the dictionary, and thumb to the appropriate page. Read the rest of this entry »

So yesterday afternoon I submitted sample pages for that puzzle book, and today I received an e-mail from the publisher saying the “design is drop-dead gorgeous . . . I think it’s lovely.” The author hasn’t seen it, though, and I had some queries about structural issues, so there may yet be changes. But I’ll post some samples eventually.

(It is perhaps appropriate to note at this point that as a designer of book interiors, I am totally in love with Amazon’s “Look/Search Inside the Book” feature, and I’m sure I’ll soon be just as enamored of Google Print. Why? Because each of these services makes it easier for me to find work I’ve done, even if I can’t remember that I did it. Copyright pages are almost always scanned, and that’s where my credit lines go; also, acknowledgment pages tend to get scanned, for those never-too-frequent occasions when one actually gets thanked in print.)

Update, 11/17: Confirmed: “design is way approved!”

Maybe I should put some tape on the bridge of my glasses for this post, just as a precaution.

At my day job, I’m trying to come up for an interior design for this kind of freaky novel about puzzles. Or, rather, it’s a novel that is a puzzle. Or something like that. Each chapter contains problems to solve, and some of the problems are shaded in red (it’s four-color throughout—yow!), and if you solve all of those and send in your results, you get a prize. Legal details TK.

But that’s not the puzzle that concerns me.

No, the biggest problem I have to solve, aside from how to make this book look tasteful, is how to represent the inevitable mathy bits in InDesign. Because although we have a single license for an adequate if klugey math Xtension for Quark XPress 4 (in a five-typesetter shop, this frequently leads to exchanges like this: “I need the math.” “Okay, I’ll quit Quark in a sec.”), it’s my long-held policy to use InDesign whenever I can get away with it. In this case, I had already started setting up the book in InDesign when I noticed how much math it contained. Simple stacked fractions, sure, I can deal with those by hand, but square roots are a pain. And complex fractions, like

?

Forget it. Seek professional help.

Read the rest of this entry »