Month: September 2006

May I take your order?

India5 Comments

As promised, here’s a sample of how I annotate a design for the compositor. These are actual specs for an actual book that was just typeset. I haven’t seen the proofs yet, but I know that it hit castoff on the first try, which is miraculous given that the book in question is an anthology and the manuscript was all tear sheet. I did not have an electronic manuscript for this book, so my samples are typeset from a disturbing amalgam of Flatland and actual snippets of text from the book, as typed (with four fingers!) by me.

I’m not presenting this as an example of fabulous design; I go back and forth between thinking it’s handsome and finding it vile. Rather, it’s a fair example of a pain-in-the-ass document structure: many of the pieces in the anthology have odd one-off design elements. One has its own dedication, one has its own credit line, one is a series of poems, one has two kinds of space break, . . . And it’s volume one of I don’t know how many, so the next in the series will probably require even more styles that get used for only one or two pieces.
Continue reading “May I take your order?” →

Alternate Facts about book design, topography typography, and printing

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While searching for something completely different (isn’t that always the best way to find things?), I just stumbled across this hilarious three-year-old post by Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Making Light: Interesting misinformation.

They call themselves Back Yard Publisher, but I prefer the page’s title tag: Publishing Your Manuescript. Their motto is good, too: Remember! There’s A Publisher in You’re Own Back Yard.

But wait—it gets better:

BYP’s biggest contribution to our understanding of movable lead type is the Alternate Fact that lead was wholly inadequate to the task:

Letter press printing is the original method of transferring ink to paper which was the predominant method of printing until the last thirty to fifty years. In this method ink is rolled on the face of the type, then a piece of paper is pressed into the wet ink and transferred to the paper. Obviously the method worked very well, although the pressure necessary to transfer the ink to the paper created many problems by smashing the soft lead type and making it useless. Letter press is seldom used today.

And no wonder. This unfortunate property of lead type also affected typography:

Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in 1440 and every since that time there has been a struggle between topographers, the people who design the type and the printers or use it.

Typographers have been concerned with how the type appeared on the page and how easily it could be read. …

Printers, on the other hand, have had to deal with a different set of problems, one of the biggest was the smashing and destruction of their precious type. This was especially true when one line of type extended beyond the normal ends of the rows of type. To prevent this destruction of the type the printer simply put some of the spacing he would normally have at the end of the lines between the words (called word spacing) or between the letters (called letter spacing) thus, solving his problem. When this happened we then had a justified page.

This is the only reason there ever was a justified page; …

Which makes the carefully justified lettering in some medieval manuscripts a complete mystery.

It’s a howl. How did I miss this when it was first posted?

Books in Small Doses

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Ohmygod. I’m so not posting, but I just had to share with you, while we’re all appreciating the fine pirates over at Distributed Proofreading, another e-book project: Daily Lit, which I learned about from Brian Feeney’s book cover review blog, Cloud.

Because if you are like us, you spend hours each day reading email but don’t find the time to read books. DailyLit brings books right into your inbox in convenient small messages that take less than 5 minutes to read.

You can choose the frequency and time of day. The list of offerings is modest and familiar, but I’m sure there are plenty of excellent books on there that you haven’t read. Now there’s no excuse.

Mighty Stupid Mouse

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I’m still not posting. I just wanted to point out that the Apple Mighty Mouse? Sucks. It’s too round and is always getting oriented just a little bit too far counterclockwise in my hand, so that I try to left-click and get a right-click instead. Also, the buttons on the side are impossibly placed. Looks pretty; lousy design.

My workaround, until I get pissed off enough to request a normal two-button mouse from GoG, has been to mark each vague-button-area of the mouse with one of those little doughnut-shaped stickers you use to reinforce the holes on looseleaf pages, so I can get my fingers in the right spots without looking. The mouse now looks like an owl:

Owl Mouse

Book advertising

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I’m not posting. I’m at work, and I’m working, of course. On a horror novel that’s eating my brain. But I thought you might be interested in the latest post by Copyranter, in which he turns his blazingly snarky spotlight on the banality of most book ads: Book Advertising. The Hackiest of the Hack. Rated PG-13 for adult language and situations, as well as insulting comments about women with cats (of which I have none). It’s a worthy topic, though.

The book ads I’ve worked on were less stupid than the example he shows, but certainly not what I’d call innovative.

Arrr!

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Sorry for the lack of posts this week. You know how I was procrastinating for a while? Yeah, well, sometimes fake deadlines turn into real ones. I’ll be copyediting and typesetting interviews all this week.

In the meantime, you can develop a sympathetic editorial cramp by contributing to the e-book booty-creation process over at Distributed Proofreading, where for One! Day! Only! they are celebrating Talk Like a Pirate Day in style:

Ahoy There: About This Site

Distributed Proofreaders be founded in 2000 by Cap’n Charles ‘Squirrel King’ Franks to support th’ digitisation o’ Public Domain book-booty. Originally chartered to assist Project Gut’nberg (PG), Distributed Proofateers (DP) be now th’ main source of PG e-books. In 2002, Distributed Privateers received their letter of marque from Project Gut’nberg and as such be supported by Project Gut’nberg. All our proofreaders, managers, developers, deckhands and so on be volunteers. . . .

Here be th’ Site Concept

This ‘ere site provides a web-based method o’ easin’ th’ proofreadin’ work associated wi’ th’ digitization o’ Public Domain books into Project Gut’nberg e-books. By divvying up th’ work into individual pages many fine, feisty swashbucklers can be attacking th’ same book at th’ same time. This significantly speeds up th’ proofreading/e-book booty-creation process.

My project goes to press on Friday. See you after that date.

What Happens When

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I don’t have a good internal sense of time. I tend not to know what day it is, can’t guess the hour with any accuracy, forget to eat lunch until 3 p.m., often let my tea steep for far too long, never leave the office at 5:00 unless I have to be somewhere else (in which case I’m typically late), stay up til 1:00 almost every night even if I’m having to hold my eyelids up with toothpicks, and tend to underestimate how long it will take me to do things. I try to counter this deficiency by setting my watch and all the clocks in my house at least five minutes fast, always setting a timer when I make tea at home, and making vigorous use of the alarms in Entourage and Google Calendar.

At my last two jobs, the problem was compounded by the fact that there were no schedules—or, at least, none that were posted or that anybody paid attention to. At the latter place in particular, the work plan was a mystery served with warm enigma glaze and an invisible cherry on top. I started to write you a timeline for a typical day, but then I thought I might get arrested and put in one of the CIA’s secret—but empty, honest!—prisons. Such opacity and evasion as I and my fellow “production artists” witnessed when trying to figure out what was really due when could only mean that our schedule was a matter of national security, and that we were being left out of the loop for our own protection.

So instead, I will focus on the positive, which is that I now work in a place where the schedules are explicit, universally distributed, and continually updated. I usually receive the necessary piles of manuscript or proofs well in advance of their due dates, and I even have time to file papers, eat lunch outside the building, study my predecessors’ work, chat by the water cooler, and once in a while turn things in before they’re due. Crazy.

So, what’s on these magnificent schedules? Here’s the typical order of operations for designing a book interior, as seen from my (heptagonal!) office:
Continue reading “What Happens When” →

The Other X-Acto and Wax Technique

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The other day, Cathi told a tragic story about how

I remember right after my newspaper moved me to a brand new building and informed me I’d have to do layout with an exacto knife and waxer again because they had no Mac for me . . .

And while I’m in awe of Cathi’s skillz, I have to say, when I think “X-Acto and wax,” my associations are quite different.

<rant>
More than once—more than once, I say!—I have seen type spec’ed in the margin as something like 16pt Akzidenz Grotesk, and I look at this tiny type and think, “Sixteen points, my ass,” and then I click on the line and find that, yeah, it’s sixteen points, with the superior attribute applied to it, so it’s shrunk down. And the designer didn’t even notice that he or she had done it. Or worse, she did notice, but she left it like that saying, “Oh, let the compositor figure out what point size it is.”

And then the same designer will demonstrate to the comp how a blockquote should be formatted by creating a separate text box with a runaround and then dropping that into the middle of a regular paragraph. Apparently because the designer doesn’t know how to set indents. And god forbid she should know what a style sheet is, or a character style. I mean, really—knowing how to use your tools, that’s so . . . working-class. Designers are professionals. Continue reading “The Other X-Acto and Wax Technique” →

Housekeeping

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The procrastination continues apace!

This post covers three things, all of which may bore the pants off you (which, depending on where you are when you’re reading this, could be exciting): (1) the XML feed, (2) affiliate links, (3) new! shorter! sidebar! If you don’t care about any of these things, go back to frolicking in the sun.

For the rest of you nerds:

  1. Those on the feed have probably figured this out, but just in case: when I write a very long post (which is most of them) and use the “click through to read more” option, to my annoyance WordPress does not give any indication in the feed that there’s more to the post. The text just stops before the Continue reading “Housekeeping” →