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A lovely turn of phrase for an unlovely thing  »

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Flinging monkeys at typewriters

1 o'clock, June 4, 2004

Started laying out All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories last weekend, on the way to and from WisCon. Still fiddling with a few things — use of small caps and old-style figures, leading of and around subheads, that kind of thing; and there’ll be some clean-up to do, to make sure that italic punctuation is consistent, leading apostrophes haven’t been turned into single quotes, that sort of thing. But it’s starting to look like a book:


Figure 1. Sample page, from Jed Hartman’s fine tale, “The Last of the Zeppelins“

I’m a little surprised that the basics of DTP don’t seem to have changed noticeably from when I was laying out the school newspaper in PageMaker 1.0 on Windows/386, fourteen years ago (!); just that now it doesn’t take all night to print a dozen pages. (Though, come to think of it, word processing hasn’t changed much in those fourteen years either — not since the introduction of outline mode in MS Word 5.1, anyway.) I expect ASZAS still won’t be as good as real, professional copy editors and typesetters and compositors and whatnot would make it, but it’ll be good enough that I won’t feel I’m embarrassing myself.

I’ve also been transcribing our one reprint, Howard Waldrop’s “You Could Go Home Again”, from my Australian edition of his collection Going Home Again. That’s been interesting, too. For one thing, I’m noticing a lot of formatting and punctuation details, exactly the same things that (while laying out the other stories) I’ve realized I don’t really have a handle on. (For another, I’m reading the story much more closely at ten minutes per page than at three pages per minute.)

Naturally our one reprint would be (1) quite long indeed, and (2) from an author whose operation is still entirely analog — but it’s worth it.

Comments

Looks beautiful, David! I really like the length of the line - very easy on the eye. Nice fonts, too -- so comfortable to read.

Are you going to use ligatures? Back in my early days of dtp, we replaced all the "fi" and "fl" occurrences with ligatures. Just wondering if people still do that these days. Seems like a lot of work for a very little payoff.

Can't wait to see the actual book!

—— Jenn Reese, 5:00 PM, Friday, June 4, 2004

Still looks great. Way cool.

I forget, did Mary Anne or I point you to (or did you otherwise encounter) the SLF Guide to Layout for Small Press/POD/Self-Publishing? If you haven't seen it, worth taking a look at even though you probably know most of what's there.

Re DTP: I think the basics are still pretty much the same; there are just better (and yes, much faster) tools available now.

Re typing in Waldrop: I usually end up typing in our reprints, but I'm told that there are extremely good Optical Character Recognition programs for Windows these days -- you just scan in the pages and OCR 'em, and you get a very low error rate. Unfortunately, the only OCR software I can find for Mac OS X is prohibitively expensive, and since I'm a fast and low-error typist, and our reprints are usually relatively short, I'm not willing to buy the software. (And it's sometimes fun to do the very close reading of a story that's engendered by retyping it.) But I gather that with Windows the OCR software often comes free with the scanner, and scanners are cheap. (They don't live in vain any more!) So if you haven't finished typing in the Waldrop, you might look into that option. I bet even if you don't have access to OCR software, someone among your readers would be willing to take a photocopy of the story and OCR it for you.

Which reminds me (though this is irrelevant to the matter at hand) that here at work we've got a copier that allegedly turns printed documents into PDFs; cool if true.

Re ligatures: some software handles them automatically, but in most contexts I consider them too much of a pain to be worthwhile.

—— Jed, 6:06 PM, Friday, June 4, 2004

Ligatures, old-style figures, the works, with almost no intervention on my part. The combination of InDesign and an OpenType font (Adobe Caslon Pro) rocks.

I've got some OCR software, actually (came with my scanner) and I've even used it on this project, to scan the MS of a contributor who was having computer problems. For Y.C.G.H.A., though, I'm not sure it's worth it — trying to get a paperback book to lay flat enough to scan near the inside margin (without breaking the spine) is no fun, for instance, and neither is having to chain myself to the scanner for a couple of hours; while I can retype the story anywhere I can take my laptop.

Anyway, I'm nearly done, and it hasn't been too bad, though after printing it out I was a little chagrined at what my typo rate turned out to be. :)

—— David Moles, 1:41 PM, Tuesday, June 8, 2004