April 1, 2010
Hyphenation in Stanza
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India, Ink., has moved. The live version of this post is now located at http://ink.indiamos.com/2010/04/01/hyphenation-in-stanza/. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Okay! I’ve got basically one month left in which to do my thesis project, so I’m thinking I should try to blog about a little something every day, to force myself to process some of this stuff. Perhaps call it BroTheBloPoMo—Brooklyn Thesis Blog Post Month.
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February 1, 2010
Clarifications
Left: Eirik Newth. Right: Me.
Easy mistake; could happen to anyone, we’re so alike. Except that, y’know, he’s a genius.
Here (with some corrections), in case anybody else interpreted my posts from this weekend in similar ways, is a way-too-long comment I just posted in response to Doyce Testerman’s Publishing, Charlotte*, and John*. You should start there, or it won’t make much sense. The part of Doyce’s post where poor Eirik gets dragged into things and where my grumbling gets taken somewhat out of context is at the very end:
In the postscript to this piece, Eirik Newth explains why Big Publishing consistently cites costs to create ebooks that fall miles outside my experience and expectation.
Short version: they’re doing it wrong.
Long version:
Publishers are still producing paper books the “X-Acto–and–wax” way and then outsourcing their e-book production to other companies, which probably automate the conversion process, and then they’re not practicing any kind of QA on what comes back, because nobody gives a shit, because the people who make the decisions don’t read e-books.
No wonder they think making an ebook is an expensive, time-consuming process.
Yes, you read that right. Publishers aren’t producing workable electronic files when they produce a paper book — their product essentially has to be OCR’d by a third party company to get an ebook out of it. They start with a hardcopy and make someone else turn it into an electronic version, which they’ll never read.
Oops. So I sez to him I sez, No, actually, you didn’t read that right:
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September 4, 2009
To be fond of ; to like ; to have good will toward ; to delight in, with preëminent affection.
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India, Ink., has moved. The live version of this post is now located at http://ink.indiamos.com/2009/09/04/to-delight-in-with-preeminent-affection/. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Love.
Chronicle Books had only a dummy of the trade edition at BEA, but the book is out now. (Buy it through Indiebound.)
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June 11, 2009
Indexigning
Via e-mail, Lars R. asks, “Would you consider doing a write-up on your blog on the production of indices and how indexing relates to the design process as a whole?”
Some topics I’m interested in include
– The usefulness of InDesign’s indexing feature (as opposed to third party programmes if they exist, or simply manually typing in numbers)
– The practicalities of the designer being involved with the nitty gritty versus any sort of indexing specialist working independently)
– At which stage in the production process indexing begins and ends
– Differences between independent/inhouse publishers and large commercial affairs
– Does the designer generally have any input to level of detail, extent etc, or is it exclusively a case of matter having priority over form? How does the index influence castoff?
June 10, 2009
“artistic standard designs, fit for a palace”
Jonathan McNicol clearly does not have enough to do. To stay out of trouble, he’s started typesetting a free Greybean edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, pages of which he expects to be posting daily until some time in October.
This kind of fits in with something Margaret, Shelby, and I were talking about doing last year. Maybe we should get off our butts and do that . . .
March 26, 2009
Big Is Beautiful
I like getting to play Dear Abby! Though lately my responses read less like sage advice and more like columns by The Non-Expert—only not funny. Yesterday Sarah wrote with some questions:
Since 2002, I have been editor for our local historical society’s 20-page quarterly. When I first started, I did it in an old version of WordPerfect and (you’ll laugh) actually cut and pasted together the booklet and took it to our local printer.
Then I got slightly more high tech and started producing PDFs from the WordPerfect files.
The next thing was a switch to the Atlantis program, which produces .rtf files, from which I made PDFs to send to our local printer.
So, I still have all the old .wpd and .rtf files.
The historical society is now interested in taking the old issues, indexing them, and publishing the old issues in books (putting several together per volume) or perhaps just putting the old issues online.
However, there is not much of a budget for new software. The new software would need to do indexing and be able to handle endnotes and read the old files.
I am looking at Serif Page Plus and SoftMaker’s TextMaker. Have you heard anything pro or con or about these programs?
As a side issue — I am also looking into producing Large Print versions of documents. It seems that there are all sorts of standards that different organizations have for producing large print books. Do you have any advice for what standard to use, and how to handle graphics for large print books (obviously the graphics need to be bigger, but I don’t know how much).
March 18, 2009
In like a lion, out like a lamb
I spent a ridiculous amount of time yesterday converting two files: one Quark XPress 6 document to InDesign CS4, and one WordPerfect document to MS Word 2004. Part of the time-suck was because my apartment is disorganized and I couldn’t, um, find one of my laptops. Most of it, though, was because I’ve forgotten a lot of my old file-conversion juju.
I used to have to jump through these kinds of hoops all the time, salvaging manuscript files that had been prepared in weird old programs on MS-DOS or whatever. But since I drifted out of the exciting world of typesetting, I haven’t had to convert a lot of texty documents. Video, audio, and image files, yes, but not so much with the text.
So, in case anybody else has forgotten or never knew how to do this stuff, here’s what I had to relearn yesterday.
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October 14, 2008
Flattery Will Get You Nowhere
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I should feel jazzed that a person I used to work with, who at that time did not know InDesign from Address Book, is still using my files as templates for new books today in his busy freelance design business. Being a spiteful, negative, unforgiving person, however, I instead find it just kind of disgusting. Because even though this person is apparently now making a nontrivial chunk of his income by designing and typesetting books (and perhaps double-billing for it, too), he clearly still doesn’t know typography from a hole in the ground.
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August 13, 2008
The many delights of publishing
Bridget points out Rachel Toor’s “A Publishing Primer” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Excerpts:
French flaps: Extensions of the cover of a paperback that fold elegantly back inside the book and hold extra copy, in imitation of the flaps of the jacket of a hardcover book. Très chic.
. . .
Headbands: Adorable, colorful ribbons at the top and bottom of hardcover books. They are there to delight you.
. . .
Monograph: A scholarly tome on a single subject or limited aspect of a subject. Monographs were once bought primarily by libraries that used to have “standing orders” for all books on certain topics from specific presses. Those days are gone. Those days have been gone for a long time. Remember that when you are revising your dissertation.
. . .
Orphan: This refers to the first line of a paragraph left sitting by itself at the bottom of a page. “Widows” are the final line of a paragraph left alone at the top of a page. It’s the publisher who creates that kind of loneliness; it’s the publisher who should take care of it.
Some of it is specific to academic publishing, and much of it is, sadly, pretty straightforward, but you may find it of use when trying to explain certain phenomena to the uninitiated.
Photo: 2008-01-25 3 Headband by Du-Sa-Ni-Ma; some rights reserved.
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July 22, 2008
Make hay while you can still hit the nail on the head.
I spent most of last week TypeCon, where I took three classes and attended about half of the presentations. The highlights were, hands down, the day I spent making mudpies at Hal Leader’s aptly named Paradise Press and Erik Spiekermann’s obscenity-laced presentation on opening night (big, big crush).
Overall, I think this was my favorite TypeCon of the four I’ve been to, but few of the conference sessions I attended stand out, so mostly I must have liked it because of my trip to Paradise. Hal’s just such a sweet guy, and he’s so enthusiastic about letterpress, and I love the smell of inky machinery, and I love doing meditative handwork like picking letters out of trays and building them into lines of text. The best TypeCon ever? Would be spending four days just doing that. I’d probably need a wheelchair afterward, though—it killed my feet to stand all day, and the next morning I discovered that I had a major sore spot way deep in my left shoulder from holding a composing stick full of lead all day.
Newsflash: Lead is heavy.
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India, Ink. 