Big Pollution poster by Geri McCormick is now available in the LeadsAndSlugs store.

I use inDesign (from Adobe) for laying out the pages, producing the table of contents and exporting the book as a pdf file to be sent to the printer. This process also gets the book ready to be exported as html which is the next step toward producing a web publication, ePub (iBooks) publication or a Kindle book.

Document setup

Create a new inDesign document and set up the page size to be equal to the final trim size of the book. A common size for a book is 5.25″ by 8″. There are any number of standard and non-standard sizes and some sizes are much more economical than others. You should consult with a printer to determine a page size that will work for your book.

Formatting your book

Here is the essence. Every bit is done with a style sheet.

For most publications, 80 percent of the paragraphs are “body copy” and use the same format. Define a body copy style sheet and apply it to the entire document. You are 80 percent done. Define style sheets for every other paragraph type in the publication and apply that style to the corresponding paragraphs. This gets you to 99 percent.

The final 1 percent is character styles. Two of them–italic, and bold. Use search and replace to find all italic words or phrases inside the paragraphs and apply the italic character style. Do the same for bold.

Adjust your style sheet definitions until your publication looks just like how you want it to look.

Final outputs

Export the pdf file for the printer. Export the pdf file for emailing your publication or placing it on the web.

Use “Cross-media Export” (from the File menu in InDesign) and choose “XHTML – Dreamweaver.” In the Save dialog be sure to specify “Export: Document,” “Images: Optimized, Formatted, and Automatic Image Conversion” and “Advanced:  Empty CSS Style Declarations.”

That’s it. The next step will be formatting the html by using the Empty CSS Style Declarations.

A book has a structure. This structure needs to be identified early and captured in the word processing document using style sheets (ideally) or at the very least identifiable consistent formatting of the word processing document(s). Since editorial is responsible for every part of a book it is necessary to outline all of the parts of the book.

Here is a rather typical list of the parts of a book.

• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Forward/Intro
  • Section
    • Chapter
    • Chapter
  • Section
    • Chapter
    • Chapter
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• Colophon

Any book can have additional sections (list of illustrations, bibliorgraphy, etc.) and many books leave a few of these sections out. But the first thing that you should notice about the list is that each of these parts will start on a new page. The parts up to the Dedication is called front matter, and the parts starting with Acknowledgements is called back matter.

The typical editorial work flow deals with the Sections and Chapters first and that material is used to generate some of the other parts of the book–the page numbers for the Table of Contents for instance can only be filled in after the book is paginated.

First we need to design a set of styles that captures the basic hierarchy of the book. Then we are going to concentrate on the Sections and Chapters in our word processing and then build out from there. Fortunately there are some standards that we can rely on to help us with the structure. These are hooks that we use to produce the printer ready pdf files, the web site, the Kindle version, and the ePub version.

You can name your styles as you create them, but I recommend that you use standard styles to define the structure. This is how the styles would go to give your book its structure.

• Heading 1
  • Heading 2
    • Heading 3

Most of the editorial work takes place within Heading 2 (Sections) and Heading 3 (Chapters). If your book contains Subsections those would be Heading 4.

Once the headings are set up there are a few very simple rules to follow with your word processing. It is mostly a matter of No.

• No blank lines
• No double spaces
• No tabs or spaces at the beginning of paragraphs
• No spaces in front of returns

Once you are into the paragraphs that make up the chapters you would use the “ruler” or paragraph formatting to make indents, centered paragraphs, bylines (flush right) and anything that effects an entire paragraph.

Inside many paragraphs there may be individual words of phrases that are either italic, bold, or bold italic. Use the bold and italic buttons in your word processor to make these typographic additions.

Using these simple rules will allow a completed manuscript to flow into whatever publishing platform comes next with the least amount of effort.

One of the things that has NOT changed is that few people know how to format books in a very basic way using common production software. What has changed is what we read. First it was printed books. Now it’s pdf, web/html, Kindle/mobi, and increasingly ePub format. Some of the software is mature and common, other software is very new and still evolving. The newest formats are very primitive in a lot of ways.

It starts with a word processor. After all words are what we are trying to publish. Words to explain, persuade, inspire–communicate. Words arranged nicely on a page or computer screen to help us understand.

I am involved with an ongoing set of projects for a small book publisher. These folks have a pretty good handle on clean word processing as a result of a solid editorial process. These projects go through InDesign into Acrobat pdf files through the proofing cycle until one day they tell me this is final and it goes off to the printer.

We have taken a hand-full of these books to the Kindle using a menagerie of software to get to the final destination–the Amazon Kindle store using one sequence of operations. Another branch of the sequence takes the book to ePub format that can be read by the other electronic readers and computers using “reader” software. I can read ePub books on my iPod Touch without going through the Apple Store.

So here’s the deal. I am going to explain and demonstrate how to take a “book” from the raw manuscript through:

• The editorial process
• Create the “master” book
• Create the pdf file (the first published output)
• Out to a commercial printer (the second published output)
• How to print it yourself (the third and most satisfying)
• How to create a web version (the fourth and the basis for the other electronic formats)
• How to use the web version and get it on your Kindle (or everyone’s)(fifth)
• How to use the web version to create ePub files for your Nook, Sony Reader, Apple iPad (hopefully), and more than a few other PC and Mac readers (sixth published version)

Yeah! That sounds like a pretty good series.

All of the ATF Book pages are scanned at 200dpi, 24 bit color using an Epson Perfection 700 scanner. The originals were saved as tiff files and saved to jpg files for the web site. The images are aproximately 1100 x 1900 pixel images. I think this is a useful size for using these images for digital image creation. Probably enough resolution for making relief plates. Certainly enough for web pages.

Anyhow, here are the images spread among several galleries:

1234►

Shadow Text

The above shadow is coded <h1 style=”text-shadow: 5px 5px 4px #666;”>Shadow Text</h1>.

The text-shadow property takes 4 values — horizontal offset — vertical offset — shadow radius — shadow color. Positive values for the horizontal and vertical offsets move the shadow to the right and down. Negative values move the opposite direction.

Letterpress Effect

We can achieve a faux letterpress effect using the following:
<h1 style=”color: #222; text-shadow: 2px 2px 2px white;”>Letterpress Effect</h1>

The shadow (white) is two pixels below the type, two pixels to the right and has a blur radius of two pixels.

Letterpress Effect

Here is another variation:
<h1 style=”color: #222; text-shadow: 0px 2px 1px #ffffff;”>Letterpress Effect</h1>

The shadow (#ffffff = white) and appears 1 pixel below the type and has a blur radius of 1–which is not very blurry at all.

Letterpress Effect

Finally, we can chain several text-shadow renderings together to further the effect:
<h1 style=”color: teal; text-shadow: -1px -1px 2px #333, 1px 1px 1px #eeeeee;”>Letterpress Effect</h1>

Notice in the code, we are simply adding a comma between each set of shadow properties.

The key to this is using small values and hues that are in the same color range as the background.

There is a bunch of things you can do with text-shadow using different values and colors chained together to get other effects. Not very letterpress like, but impressive.

This code:
text-shadow: 0 0 4px white, 0 -5px 4px #FFFF33, 2px -10px 6px #FFDD33, -2px -15px 11px #FF8800, 2px -25px 18px #FF2200
gives you this:

Fire Next Time

Here is a scan done on my Epson Perfection V700 Photo scanner. The scanner is pretty accurate so this looks like the page is now. Fade and all…

On the second scan, I used the scanner’s “color restoration” setting which radically changes the color. It looks better. I think the changes made by the software is meant for color photos–faded color photos.

The third image–I took this into aperture to remove the pink cast, straighten the image and add a bit of sharpening. Does this look like the page looked originally?

How well do you think this works on old printing ink? Has the black really faded to green?

The book was printed entirely on letterpress. One of the books is mainly intact and is on display in the Printing and Book Arts Center. The other book is falling apart. I suppose that I should restore the binding and I probably will eventually, but since it is in several sections, it is possible to scan some of the pages.

This is a gallery of some of the pages. I will post more scans in the coming weeks and months.

Bonus: find the backward type.