Category Archives: Book Production

Leading-Trim destroying traditional typography

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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 … Continue reading →

Almost time to go. Maranatha! 

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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!!!

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Some free font design resources

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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 … Continue reading →

New InDesign update arrives with nice feature upgrades

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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 … Continue reading →

Boxy FontSpring introductory offer is really cheap

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The Boxy FontSpring introductory offer is really cheap. As my new font family, Boxy, rolls out there is a wonderful intro offer on Fontspring. It currently available at MyFonts, FontSpring, Creative market, and here on this site. As many of you know, normal professional pricing on MyFonts, fonts.com, or YouWorkforThem is $24.95 per font and $74.95 for the four-font family. The FontSpring price is exceptional. Boxy FontSpring introductory offer is really cheap Until mid-February, their price is … Continue reading →

Kindle image size rules change again

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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 … Continue reading →

Old Hermann Zapf film from 1967

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Today I ran across this Old Hermann Zapf film [look at the end of the post]. It’s an old film, 1967. But, it starts out with Hermann freehanding large caps with chalk on a chalkboard. It’s breathtaking. The letters look remarkably like what we finally see in Zapfino. It was produced by Hallmark during a visit Mr. Zapf made there. Here’s a quote from an article on Linotype where they have a lot more info: Hermann’s account of … Continue reading →

Powerful book design font groups are rare

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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 … Continue reading →

Some new year self-publishing trends for 2018

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Sarah, from Marketing Christian Books, has shared some new year self-publishing trends for 2018. There are five things to mull over and I think she’s right. Independent publishing will continue to grow. But this is a mixed blessing. The number of books is growing like crazy, but the number of readers hasn’t changed much since 2012. Amazon will continue to streamline operations for book publishing. There’s good reason to believe that Createspace will disappear and print books will … Continue reading →

2018 ebook conversion guide using InDesign CC

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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, … Continue reading →