Author: India

What are your “desert island” layout tools?

India2 Comments

On Tuesday I submitted the following modest list of software requests to IT:

  • Quicksilver (free)
    Application launcher and much, much more! I know it still claims to be beta, but I’ve used almost every version since it was released, with no problems.

  • TextWrangler (free)
    Text editor

  • PrintWindow Standard (free)
    Prints Finder windows

  • Badia FullMeasure XT ($79.99)
    Multifunction Quark XTension that seems to do everything the constellation of tools [for Quark 4, mostly pirated] I used to have accomplished

  • Editor’s Toolkit Plus ($69.95)
    Word macro set for scrubbing manuscripts

  • India Ink ($15)
    Photoshop plugin for mucking with halftones

  • MS Office 2004 ($?)
    Not at all urgent, but for the record, the current version has much better style sheet handling than Word X. I’m probably one of two people in the building who uses style sheets in Word, but I’m just saying, is all.

  • Firefox (free)
    Current version (1.5; I’m still on 1.0.7)

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Juvenilia

India5 Comments

I’ve been doing this book thing for a long, long time. Here’s the proof: How to Care for a Guinea Pig.

Cover

Some of the advice in this book is, um, dubious, but overall it’s a pretty thorough catalogue of everything I knew about guinea pigs when I was nine.

Albino Guinea Pigs have white fur and red eyes. The reason thier eyes are red is because thier eyes really don’t have any color at all so yo look right through them and everyone hold your breath! You can look at the back of the eye! Albinos are not the only guinea pigs with red eyes but I am just telling you.

Castoff viewed from an editor’s chair

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Here’s an illuminating take on castoff from Teresa Nielsen Hayden, empress of the awesome blog Making Light and editor of Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin, which just won the 2006 Hugo Award for Best Novel:

This morning I find myself thinking about how I went to the wall when Tor’s previous head of production grossly miscalculated Spin’s castoff, and wanted to raise its price based on her overlong estimated length. That would have been corrected when Spin was typeset, and the price would have been readjusted downward; but that artificially high price would have been in play during the period when advance orders were solicited, and would have resulted in fewer orders.

So it’s probably safer to underestimate a book’s castoff than to overestimate it (though I’m sure an accurate castoff is the goal, all around).

On Thursday I started working on a composition order for a book whose castoff according to the worksheet was 320, yet whose editor asked for a page count of 256. My response on reading the transmittal was a hearty snork. For a hardcover-only design I might have been able to do something about it (something uncommonly ugly, but that’s still something). However, because this book was to be shot down to mass market, and because it was supposed to be following a previously established series design that used a rather uneconomical typeface for the body text, the closest I could get was 304. When I took the sample pages upstairs to show Mr. Lint Trap, to my surprise he said that 304—or even 320—would be fine with him, and that the editor probably hadn’t even seen the castoff before making the request for 256. Okay, that makes sense.

The thing about hitting 304 pages vs. 320, though, is that there’s a retail price jump between them—$23.95 to $24.95—so the 304-page book will cost the publisher more than a 256-pager would in typesetting, printing, paper, freight, and everything else, but it might possibly make that up in sales by avoiding the chilling effect on the consumer of a 320-pager’s $1 higher sticker price. Possibly.

Then again, the typesetter may not be able to hold it at 304 pages after all. They’ve been hitting castoff with most of my designs, but occasionally something weird comes out. We’ll see.

From the Onion

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Résumé Font Offends Employer

More typography reportage from the Onion:

And you can bet this book’s design uses drop folios: 14-Word Diet Stretched To 200 Pages (January 21, 2004).

Beautiful Bindings

India4 Comments

Little Folks in Feathers and Fur

If you were at all interested in the recent posts about bindings—or if you just like to look at pretty things—do visit the University of Rochester’s exhibit Beauty for Commerce: 1890–1910:

This exhibit chronicles the growth of English and American publishers’ binding from its infancy in the 1830s to its decline in the early 20th century. Highlighted are the distinct changes in design that reflected not only technical innovations in the means of book production and decoration but shifting social and cultural trends as well. Viewed as a group, publishers’ bindings represent a revolution in the history of the book. Viewed individually, each binding offers an often gilded window to the fashion of its day.

Some specimens that caught my eye: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

Slaver, slaver, drool drool.

[Thanks, POLLEN!]

Trust no one.

India16 Comments

On Thursday afternoon, the day Mr. Mac Tech was supposed to come upgrade my computer, I made some backups. I felt kind of silly doing it, but I justified my paranoia by telling myself I’d need copies of some of my files for Friday, when I’d be working on someone else’s computer. And you never know which book someone will ask you an urgent question about, so I sorted my job folders by date and backed up all the ones that had been modified since the day I started. I also backed up my Firefox settings, address book, Entourage database, and a bunch of other miscellaneous crap. Three full CDs. And then I printed out a file listing for each and stuck them in my desk drawer. To the desktop I downloaded the installers for Quicksilver, TextWrangler, and Print Window.

You can see where this is going, I’ll bet.
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Tomorrow!

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I get! The new! Disk! Image!

The job I started at the end of May is my first at a Large Corporation, so it’s my first time dealing with an IT department and a locked-down applications folder.

When I arrived here and saw my lush silver G5 tower and the slim 19-inch Apple Cinema monitor—not to mention the window and the door and the drafting table—I was thrilled. Jobs at places that have money can be good!

When I turned the computer on and discovered that it was loaded up with cutting-edge software such as OS 10.2.8 (Jaguar—that’s two cats ago, for those of you not using Macs), Quark XPress 6.1, Illustrator 10, Photoshop 7, and Acrobat 6.0.1, however, I was, let’s say, less thrilled.

Now, I love Mac OS X, but I love it in the current version, and I love it My Way—with a constantly adjusted array of little helper applications and custom settings. Call it a legacy of my years of power-using Windows, if you disapprove. So when I found that the application folder was locked so that I couldn’t install Quicksilver, which would have made up for the most annoying deficiencies of Jaguar’s primitive Finder, nor such useful tools as TextWrangler and PrintWindow, I was, mmm, pissed.

But I’ve watched The IT Crowd; I know you can’t just call the guys in the basement and say, “Fix my computer!” Because first they’ll let the phone ring forty-five times, then they’ll ask you to turn your computer off and on again, and then they’ll have madcap adventures—while still failing to fix your computer. These things have to be finessed.
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TypeConclusions

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Looking back over the TypeCon program, it’s amazing to me how many sessions I missed. But, you know, the weather was beautiful, and I’m not much of a morning person. Or an evening person—I also blew off all the parties and field trips. (But I’m a regular ace at “Break for lunch on your own.”)

Of the talks I did attend, only one was so boring that I really fell asleep. But that one—woo! It was a doozy. I’ll just say that it cured me of any desire, however slight, ever to attend RISD. Then there were a couple of borderline presentations that were mostly interesting but a bit of a challenge to sit through in a dark, too-cool room. In most of these, it was a matter of quantity: twenty-five minutes would have been perfect; forty minutes was about thirty minutes too much. For example, I didn’t know jack about “The Wonderful World of William Addison Dwiggins” and enjoyed the first two presentations thereon pretty thoroughly. But approximately 237 pieces of fascinating ephemera into the third segment, I just had to stagger out. Couldn’t. Stay. Awake. Fortunately, when I got to the hang-out area, there were cookies! And tea!

Suggestion to organizers for next year: Have the tea trolleys roll up and down the aisles during the talks, for less attrition.
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