These are my current book production and font design books
The newest releases are: Book Publishing With InDesign CC. It covers through CC [2015.3], though there have been few changes which affect us much since CC [2014]. Many of the changes I’ve been waiting for with ePUB production have been implemented.
InDesign now stands at the top of the heap for book production in general and ePUB production in particular. You do not need to know code, though understanding how HTML and CSS works will aid your conceptual understanding.
I have recently released two video courses on this material.
It shares and demonstrates the latest, most efficient, basic font production workflow for single fonts and font families. David has spent over twenty years refining his font design techiques. This book does not offer a lot of intellectual design help. This is focused on
- “How the heck do I do this?” and
- “How can I quit spinning my wheels?” and
- “Why is this taking me so much time?”
These techniques will enable you to enjoy font design by letting you focus on the actual drawing of characters with a clear plan and a workflow which does not get in your way.
In the process of producing my popular video course on Practical Font Design, I radically streamlined my workflow for FontLab Studio 5. I have shared that with you in this book released earlier this year, 2016.
Here’re some book design posts
Black and white often provides focus
Throughout my life as an artist/designer I have been struck with how black and white often provides focus. It’s beautiful visual decision, but it tends to be more difficult than color.
Elegance and simplicity are very hard to achieve without being stark and lifeless. The painting on the left is the first one I painted after I met Jesus in January, 1974. Being left-handed, it reads from right to left. The simple exuberance of leaving the chaos of my life before into the reality of the creator’s world and Kingdom still hits me very hard. The harsh abstractions no longer appealed to me. There is very little of my work that I can go back to and be satisfied with what I did.
This post was triggered by an article I saw this morning about the winners in the top black and white photos competition. They are beautiful. But most of them have nothing to say. They are black and white as an abstraction.
Don’t ignore greyscale: black and white often provides focus
Lately, I’ve been working on graphite drawings. It’s been a long time since I was challenged at this deep a level. My drawings so far are so much less than powerful. They’re getting there. But, I don’t know if I’ll have the physical skills to do something like this until the New Creation. It’s one of the major things I’m looking forward to—when I get my perfect body, perfectly functional for who I am, and who The Lord wants me to be.
This inability to produce what I need to do to communicate clearly is a major frustration of this fallen world. I’m being shown how to get the anointing into my fiction. But it’s another step all together to have the anointing in reality, dealing with people in a way that edifies, comforts, and blesses.
How I long to be one with Jesus, to learn things like this. How frustrating it is to be designed to create something far beyond your natural ability. That’s the glory of knowing Jesus. He can sustain me even in the midst of a fallen world. The joy of creating butterfly, a platypus, a woman, a man completely infuses my Lord and Master. What a joy He is!
Here’s the best image from the photo competition article, in my opinion:
Leading-Trim destroying traditional typography
Leading-Trim destroying traditional typography seems a strange way to start an article on typography. But for the sake of Web developers, who are commonly typographic illiterates, they are toying with changing the historic basis of paragraph spacing, and all line spacing. What set me off is an article I read this morning in Medium, a magazine with which I was unfamiliar.
The head and subhead are:
Leading-Trim: The Future of Digital Typesetting
How an emerging CSS standard can fix old problems and raise the bar for web apps
The true title should be: Let’s toss out traditional typography and do what we want.I don’t want to overstate this, but the article says that what is being proposed for CSS is a new CSS property. You can see below what is proposed. However, there’s a major error in their statement. The truth is: Leading-trim seeks to change the standard we’ve been using for well over 650 years.
“Introducing leading-trim
“Leading-trim seeks to change the standard we’ve been using for 24 years.
“Leading-trim is a new CSS property that the CSS Working Group is introducing. Just as the name suggests, it works like a text box scissor. You can trim off all the extra space from reference points of your choice with just two lines of CSS.”
Leading-Trim is destroying traditional typography by making CSS something other than that
This is no small thing. This means that Word and InDesign, and presumeably all word processors and page layout software, will be on a different system entirely. The article says they are just changing one little rule. Balderdash! That one little rule eliminates the basis of spacing in typography, standard leading—from the top of the ascender to the bottom of the descender, plus the built-in leading added by the font designer.
This means that traditional typographic design knowledge no longer works on the Web
Now I know this is a hugely complex system where everyone does what they think is right in their own eyes. But this one little new CSS property overthrows all of that.
Almost time to go. Maranatha!
Almost time to go. Maranatha! I had a little fun with a spring-time t-shirt. Here’s a link.
I’ll add the graphics below. Of course, it’s Zazzle so you can use the designs on anything.
Front: Over the heart
Back: covers the back
I pray you have a blessed Passover/Easter feast. He is risen!!!
Some free font design resources
This is just a quick note about some free font design resources which provide good typographic knowledge. I’m mentioning this because a large portion of my readers don’t come out of a professional graphic design or typographic background. These things are often not known by authors whose background is mostly found in Office and free design apps.
The longer you work in page layout, the more important fonts and font design become for many if not most people. The reasons for this are multiple.
- They’re an important part of your design style
- Your readers have grown up in a world of marketing where font choices matter
- Font designs are used to trigger reactions in readers
- Page layout has many assumptions which you violate at your peril
“Typography is an assumed baseline skill of any graphic designer in the late 20th century [ED: and still is up to this day]. But it is virtually unknown outside the world of publishing. Much of this knowledge has been attacked and eroded by our modern video-centered world. Many modern graphic designers can barely read—if you can imagine that. This is a larger problem than you might think because much of our typographic knowledge, as individuals, comes from all the excellent typography we have been reading since we learned to read.” From Basic Book Typography a book by David Bergsland 2011
Free font design resources from Monotype
This is the page which lists postings and articles from fy{T}I, Fontology, and fonts.com blog. fy{T}i is a newsletter which comes from MyFonts on an occasional basis. But it has good information. The one which arrived today is about different versions of the same font. Linotype.com has an online magazine. These resources are part of what’s offered by the Monotype family of online font resources. They are a massive corporate effort of designing, producing, marketing, and selling fonts. This is a professional’s resource, and you need to keep an eye on it. As you learn page layout and typography, these resources will help. Remember, many of the choices you make are governed by normal reader expectations.
The fonts are an essential choice of professional designers
Full disclosure: I need to mention that I do sell my fonts on several of Monotype’s Websites. MyFonts.com, fonts.com, Linotype.com, and probably more. There are many of the larger font sales sites which have been brought under Monotype umbrella. MyFonts, especially, sells most of the font foundries in the world today including big ones like Adobe [only 346 of their families—all 1846 families are available as part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription for their apps: InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and 17 more] down to tiny ones like Hackberry Fonts [all 65 families of my efforts].
All of your design efforts will be colored by your font choices.
The free fonts are instantly recognizable to pros and many non-pros. This is not a bad thing, but you will find people who react to that negatively, but often subconsciously. Sadly, this is one of the issues faced by most Christian authors. For some reason, using professional tools is often considered simply outside the budget. (Yes, I’m guilty of it also.) Or, a general poverty mentality will not allow the better choices to even be considered. For Kindle books, which will probably be forced into using Bookerly by Amazon regardless, you may have no choice.
But for print books, it matters a lot. It’s one of the reasons, I formerly wasted a lot of effort on trying to show authors that using Word for layout compromises your efforts from the start. I’ve discovered that this battle is largely a waste of time on my part. But, believe me, readers outside the insular community of self-published authors notice the general low level of production subconsciously, at the very least.
New InDesign update arrives with nice feature upgrades
The new InDesign update arrives with more than just a bunch of fixes. It gives us new controls for shading and borders in consecutive paragraphs. You can now export a document as individual page PDFs. There are several other things which might interest you. You can find them at Adobe’s What’s New page.
Dealing with consecutive paragraphs
As you probably recall, if you had shading or borders applied to consecutive paragraphs, you were forced to have a style for the beginning paragraph, the middle paragraphs, and the ending paragraph. You can see that procedure to the left.
We covered that in this post from last October when InDesign CC 2018 was released. I find these controls very helpful for sidebars conversions in ePUBs for example. Because there is normally no room for sidebars in smartphones or tablets, the best solution is to leave them inline with a border and a tint behind them. This visually places the sidebar where it is supposed to be—as extra, optional reading for the good readers.
New InDesign update arrives with new shading controls
The only quibbles are that the controls are only on the paragraph border page. But it works well. The offsets work where they hope they would—above the top paragraph and below the bottom paragraph in the group of paragraphs.
So, it makes an existing feature work better. That’s what incremental updates are supposed to do. Right?
The ability to export a document as separate PDF pages has been asked for a long time
Evidently, several workflows require this. I rarely need it but it’s nice.
If you’re addicted to AI or PS shortcuts
You can now make that choice. Seems silly to me as InDesign is much more powerful in creating custom shortcuts. But??
Richer analytics for Publish Online documents
Mainly, the overall analytics view is gone—replaced by an individual button for each item. As always it’s quite slow.
Kindle image size rules change again
Again, Kindle image size rules change. Not a whole lot, but the new outrageous Kindle image sizes become more understandable. I was reading a Kindle formatting guide, from Amazon, the other day which said full-width images needed to be 3000 pixels wide. This is not that bad.
However, in Aaron Shepard’s Publishing Blog today, I read the following paragraphs:
But not long ago, I received one of those dread quality notices from Amazon, in this case warning me of “low-resolution” images in one of my books. The images in question, of course, were far from low-resolution, but they did fall just shy of current recommendations of Amazon that are apparently now starting to be enforced. And I had to conform to those recommendations or risk having the book taken off sale.
Here’s how Amazon figured it: First, they posited a standard display size of 4 x 6 inches for large tablets. (Note the 2:3 ratio, which my book recommends for full-page images, instead of the narrower shape in Amazon’s older advice.) Then they declared that an image that fills that area should display at a resolution of at least 300 pixels per inch, for a total of at least 1200 x 1800 pixels.
It looks like Aaron’s problem is that he was trying to manipulate the HTML to force the images to be full-width. Not only is that an exercise in frustration, but you tend to call down the formatting police upon yourself.
So, the Kindle image size rules change again
They are directing everything at the Fire, of course. For me, these new rules actually let me make my images a bit smaller. But for the training manuals, where I have 200–400 images, this is a huge deal. Many of these images are screen captures of 600 dpi wide or so. I have no idea how they are going to handle that. [Actually, I do. They will make the images really small.]
I released a new book over the weekend. It has five images in it (including the small cover I always include on page one). The images are all small—2-3 inches, with the largest being 5″x5″. After all the fonts are stripped out and replaced with Bookerly, the file size is still huge—2.3 MB.
An interesting find with Draft2Digital
I decided to let D2D publish my book to Kindle. I’m tired of messing with it. They did what I’ve been recommending: All fonts are converted to Bookerly. The lists are converted to HTML lists. Supposedly there’s a new version of Kindle Previewer 3 that does tables better. I’ll believe that when I see it.
Powerful book design font groups are rare
For the holidays, I set up a 64% Off sale for one of my powerful book design font groups on MyFonts. This includes the font families of Librum, Librum E, Librum Sans, Bookish, Bream, and Bulkr. So, instead of the normal $25 a font/$75 a family, all the individual fonts and families in the Librum Book Design Group are available for $9 per font/$27 per family or less through February 3, 2018.
The image on the left links to a copy of the specimen book which you are welcome to download. These fonts have proven to be exceptional for the formatting of books—especially complex non-fiction with multiple lists, complex head-subhead structures, tables, and so on. You can find some samples of this formatting here.
In my daily life, writing and formatting books, the Librum group has been a delight to use. Much of that, of course, comes from the way it fits my personal tastes in typography. However, you’ll discover that the design freedom provided by a group of fonts with the same vertical metrics will be a great help in your designs. Such groups are hard to find.
Of course, there’s always an exception: Bulkr
The only thing missing from the group was a strong display font. I built Bulkr from Librum Sans bold, but it soon developed a life of its own. I wanted a font which worked as well Impact with softer shapes (whatever that means). This meant radically different font metrics, of course. As the newest font in the group, I have less experience with it. But, its intended use in cover design matches my expectations. I believe you’ll find it useful.
Powerful book design font groups are rare, especially at 64% Off
Even better, this package of 20-fonts remains available only from this site at $99.99—which comes out to $5 per font. Also only in this package, I’m giving a Desktop, Web, and ebook license. Normally, just the ebook license for a single book would double the cost. But I want to offer this to fellow authors needing the help when designing their ePUB Reflowable and ePUB FXL books.
So, try it. I think you’ll like it!
2018 ebook conversion guide using InDesign CC
I thought a good way to start the new year would be a 2018 ebook conversion guide. Things changed quite a bit in 2017. Plus, CC 2018 added some handy new features. Remember, I have a seemingly unusual attitude. I believe that spending a lot of time hand-coding a book is a waste of time. The good news is that InDesign CC now works well enough to make writing code unnecessary.
2018 ebook conversion guide
As you know, almost all of InDesign’s output is in ebook form. Even for the print book, we produce a PDF. This PDF reads wonderfully well in iBooks or any ereader which can handle PDFs. You can also make a full-color downloadable version.
Now that ePUBs and Kindle books have reached the tipping point [become more than 50% of sales for most of us], we truly need to be sure we make an excellent ebook for sale. At this point, my best sales per distributor are again through Createspace. But including Kindle, Amazon has close to two-thirds of my book sales. However, this is still changing fairly quickly. Both the iBookstore and Kobo are stagnating. Nook is shooting itself in the foot. Direct uploads to those three sites are barely 1% of my book sales. Even including Smashwords, Draft2Digital, and GooglePlay, these three ereader competitors [iBooks, Nook, and Kobo] are barely twelve and a half percent. My direct sales are more than that.
ePUB & Kindle design in InDesign
The 2018 ebook conversion guide will probably change throughout the year—as it always does. I do need to mention two basic assumptions before you can make an ePUB or Kindle book.
- First of all, you need the book completely written, edited, and proofread: It’s very painful to format a book that is not completed unless you are actually writing in InDesign [which I recommend, as you know]. Plus, you certainly do not want a situation where you make changes in the ePUB which need to be added to the print version and on and on.
- Secondly, you need to have the book completely formatted for print in InDesign: This means that all copy is formatted with styles: paragraph, character, table, cell, and object styles. No local formatting is acceptable. If it is not completely formatted, you will have no way to control your ePUB globally and you will waste many hours and probably many days, weeks, or months.
Everything in HTML/CSS is formatted. Basically, all we have to deal with are h1–h6 and p. Though coding purists will squeal, InDesign’s use of classes enables a full use of typographic styles: paragraph and character. If you remain typographically challenged I suggest my book, Book Publishing With InDesign CC, or my video coursework on Udemy.
Fixed Layout ebooks
PDF remains the obvious answer, but creating PDFs outside of Adobe can introduce quality issues. Plus, they really do not read well on mobile devices—even on tablets. However, we do have three viable options.
- The downloadable PDF: Yeah, I know what I just said. However, many people want and prefer a PDF. I assume they want it for their laptop or desktop computers. However, your print PDF should really be modified for excellent use as a downloadable PDF with color graphics, photos, and layout details. You should also eliminate as much front matter as possible and use your color cover as your title page. I often do one in readers’ spreads and one in single pages.
- ePUB FXL: This fixed layout ePUB is accepted by iBooks and Kobo. So far, I’ve never really seen any sales here. But if you are using the book for a textbook, I would suggest making a print version which will work as an ePUB FXL also. In InDesign, there are remarkably few limitations other than no OpenType features can be used, and you cannot use justified copy.
- Kindle’s Print Replica version: Kindle provides a free app, Kindle Textbook Creator, which converts a PDF to a fixed layout Kindle which they label [Print Replica]. I use my full-color downloadable PDF for that. It converts your PDF to a KDF, retaining all links, very quickly. The upload presents no issues, and the resulting Kindle book sells surprisingly well. I now do both a reflow and a Print Replica version for many of my Kindle books.
Opentype features for the 2018 ebook conversion guide
In general, ePUBs and Kindle reflowable versions still cannot handle OpenType features. Because of this, I developed special ebook versions of my normal book production font families. The Librum group has Librum E which uses oldstyle figures and contains several dingbats to use with lists. In addition, Librum E Sm Cap enables me to use small caps in my ebooks. For the Contenu family, I developed Contenu Ebook but I never created a small caps font for ebooks.
Typekit in the Creative Cloud allows ebook use. You’ll need to look for fonts where oldstyle figures are the default. Some of the full families also have Small Cap versions.
Reflowable ebooks: ePUB & Kindle
ePUBs can handle most of what you need. There are still some problems with tables but even here InDesign works fairly well. You can only use solid and dashed borders, with no gradients. Your lists can be quite complex—if you use the Convert to Text option. Nested styles work flawlessly. Plus, you can embed any font for which you have a license. You do have to use TTF or OTF fonts.
Draft2Digital now accepts embedded fonts in an ePUB2 for distribution. They work for everything except Scribd, at this point. Smashwords accepts an ePUB2, but only my Kindle version [see below].
Kindle Reflowable: These books cause me fits. It has gotten so bad that I produce a very stripped down version for them. They usually strip out enbedded fonts—as a result I set my Kindle books entirely in Bookerly [Amazon’s Kindle font of choice]. They cannot handle fancy lists or dingbats so I leave them on Map to Unordered or Ordered and accept the ugliness of HTML lists. They destroy tables. As a result, I convert simple tables to graphics or rewrite them into a list. The problem seems to be their post-upload convertion to “Enhanced Typography”. They change the books without your knowledge or input. You have to buy a copy to find out what they did—though you can see some of the changes in Look Inside.
Their graphics requirements are very specific. I posted on this last June. Basically, they want print-quality JPEGs. The resolutions are very high. For full-width images, they want 3200 pixels wide. You can use GIFs or PNGs for lineart, but the maximum size in pixels remains 600w by 500h.
The ebook future grows complex
The ebook future grows complex — more confusing as far as I can tell. Right now in my work, ebook design is being largely constrained by the limits of Kindle. I’ve mentioned this several times. Increasingly Apple ebooks are becoming a problem as the Apple marketers constantly change their marketing lingo. At least monthly, Apple bounces one of my ebooks because I am using what they told me to use, i.e. the iBookstore, and now they don’t allow that. I’m changing my writing to always just call them Apple ebooks. That seems to be safe for now.
The ebook future grows complex conference
Actually, the conference was called W3C Publishing Summit 2017. In an extremely interesting ePUBSecrets post this morning, Teresa Elsey from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt shared some important reactions and information. Here’s a list that certainly matches my experience, plus more:
- “Many of our familiar problems are prevalent, especially in less-mature international markets; for example, low-quality ebooks, many PDF-only, many EPUB2 files, publishers not understanding how to modify InDesign-produced EPUB files.
- The majority of EPUBs submitted by US publishers are still EPUB2. Microsoft said 90% of their US catalog is EPUB2, with 63% of titles created in 2017 still EPUB2. Existing EPUB files still have lots of problems, like faulty or nonexistent TOCs, images used for text content, poor accessibility, and bad/missing metadata.
- The fixed-layout format is still misused/overused from the retailer perspective. And FXL is not bulletproof – it will reflow if, for example, if an ereader can’t access your embedded fonts.
- There are still many places where PDF is a prevalent ebook format. EPUB is not a strong brand for users. For example, many readers may choose PDFs simply because they know and recognize the format. And of course there are many documents besides books – journals, magazines, news, documentation, textbooks – that are still most commonly available only in PDF.
- Liisa McCloy-Kelley (Ebook VP at Penguin Random House) mentioned two future challenges she foresees as print, web, and digital publishing become integrated:
- Fonts (different rights for different environments)
- Image quality/optimization (some digital contexts now require better-than-print quality).
- One interesting tidbit: Japanese ebooks are almost all EPUB3 because EPUB2 never had sufficient language support for Japanese, and 72% are FXL (manga!). So while we know the FXL user experience needs to be better, Japanese ebook producers are hyper aware of this fact and are driving innovation in FXL performance, speed, amount of device storage, etc.
- My favorite fact to take back to my team is that Kobo says they’ve fixed font obfuscation on their readers, so we don’t have to remove font encryption on InDesign-generated books for them anymore (… which we usually learned about when our FXL books reflowed because of missing fonts, to disastrous results; see above).”
I still use ePUB2, for example, because it works better with D2D and Smashwords
I don’t consider this a good thing, but it is a reality in my world. I have reluctantly added a Kindle conversion process where everything is set in Bookerly with HTML lists and no tables because I am tired of them butchering anything else I give them. So, as the ebook future grows complex, we can expect worse.
InDesign CC 2018 adds borders to shading
I’ve waited a long time to write this: InDesign CC 2018 adds borders to shading! This is one I’ve been pushing for over the past decade or so. I was excited when they added paragraph shading. I never could understand why the borders weren’t added at the same time. Regardless, the InDesign team added them for this update.
Finally, we have a good sidebar solution for ePUBs
This has always been a major hassle in ePUB design. Sidebars simply don’t work in ePUBs—realistically speaking. I’ve written a lot about how multiple columns are simply not practical in a reflowable design—which is likely to be viewed on an iPhone. This is especially true in our major market: Kindle. However, it remains to be seen if KDP will display this new feature. I hope so—and plan to bug them about it if they refuse.
InDesign CC 2018 adds borders to shading
It’s a well-done feature. It works the way you expect. The only problem is that with corners and borders, you will need the same four styles which were required by the original paragraph shading feature. In addition, the borders require more attention than simple shading requires.
Here are the setups I used for the paragraph above
The shading: [click to enlarge]
Setting up the shading: As you can see, I used a 10% tint of a dark purple for the shading. I added eighth inch beveled corners. Finally, I offset the shading a sixteenth of an inch top and bottom, and an eighth inch left and right. Because the copy is justified I set the shaded box with the Width: Text.
If I want the shaded box the width of the column (as in the featured image above): I change the indents of the text to fit inside the box.
The Border: [click to enlarge]
Setting up the border: I used the same set up for it as I used for the shading, with a .5 pt stroke.
The problem shows up when you want multiple paragraphs within a bordered and tinted box.
This requires a bit of a delicate dance. For this you will need three more styles. I added extra space before and after the paragraphs on the next page so you could see them separately. The top & bottom styles work with two paragraphs. Any of the styles can be used when a paragraph splits across frames [I don’t use multi-column frames at all for the mostly single-story books].
Top Style: Corners and borders at the top and sides, with a simple non-cornered, non-bordered edge on the bottom.
Style for middle paragraphs: Here all you need are the side borders, with no corners.
Bottom style: For two paragraphs, you need corners and borders at the bottom and sides, with a simple non-cornered, non-bordered edge on the top.
The only problems I’ve found is that I often have to tinker with the measurements on the offsets to get pieces to align. For example, on the middle style, I had to make the right offset .141 [instead of the .125] to get them to align. But that’s minor stuff because, finally, InDesign CC 2018 adds borders
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