Category Archives: Typography

InDesign On-Demand: Low Budget Publishing Digitally for ministries and non-profits

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A Brand New Release: Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 & InDesign 7.5—a Radiqx Press Ministry Aid Help for authors & teachers publishing in the new millennium The focus of this book is very sharp. It is designed for people who are designing books and booklets with very limited capital and few personnel resources. It is a sharing of techniques for the new wave of author/pastor/teacher/designers who need to get their work published digitally & online. It is designed to … Continue reading →

So: you need to provide ministry resources?

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Now there is some real help. InDesign has been the best page layout tool for print for over a decade now. I was blessed to be in on the beta team for version one in 1999. I can remember how excited I was that there was finally a software tool I could use fluently that fit the way I think. Now InDesign 7.5 for the Design Premium suite CS5.5 is here I don’t know when it will … Continue reading →

Why ebooks need typography

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What is typography? A good functional definition is very sweet and simple: Typography is the art & craft of making words easy and comfortable to read Some of this has to do with font choices: But ebooks (other than PDF) do not presently allow embedded fonts Some has to do with leading and point size: but ebooks give few controls here, and the readers can butcher that at will A lot has to do with column width: … Continue reading →

My new release on Kindle: Practical Font Design: Building a set of book design font families eBook: David Bergsland: Kindle Store

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Amazon.com: Practical Font Design: Building a set of book design font families eBook: David Bergsland: Kindle Store. My second font design book is up on Kindle now…

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A major new release at Hackberry Font Foundry

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Announcing this all over You may have seen this already, but it is a major piece of work and probably my most mature and sophisticated set of font designs yet. I finally broke down and spaced them for body copy—so they will work well at text sizes [from 9-point to 12-point] without the need to fiddle with the spacing. The design is a contemporary take on oldstyle serif typefaces using Jenson as the mask. The roots of … Continue reading →

PDF to ePub conversions

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No, this is not a step by step. It’s a discussion of the realities of dealing with publishing in the second decade of the 21st century. Specifically, I want to talk about dealing with graphically intensive books in multiple channels. One of the Linked-In groups I’m in has been debating the role of XML in “future-proofing” documents. They are mainly coming from employment at large publishing houses with hundreds or thousands of legacy books—many from before the … Continue reading →

Silly me! Found a new shortcut in FontLab

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It really helps production efficiency and speed. Great find! Command+Arrow Key on selected pieces moves 100 units This shows my ignorance of things like this, but I just discovered a great shortcut built into FontLab. As I have mentioned many times, moving selections right or left is a constant thing—especially while building composite glyphs and letterspacing a new font. One of my irritations over the years has been the internal debate over whether it is more efficient … Continue reading →

Making an essential anchored object style

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Adding anchored objects can be a little tedious. One of the most painful aspects of making anchored frames to hold illustrations, sidebar notes, or headlines is the tediousness of the repetitive filling out of the anchored object dialog box. The simple solution is to make those settings in an object style. Then all you do is place the object as an inline graphic and hit the shortcut to convert it to an anchored object and to offset it where you need it. Or … Continue reading →

Converting book sizes easily

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The other day I went through a common scenario> I had a 408 page book set up at 6×9. I found out that I needed it formatted to 4.25″ x 6.88″ for a different printer. How long do you think it took me? It became a 540 page book. It took less than an hour. How did it go so quickly? Everything was formatted with styles including all the graphics. The graphics were all formatted as anchored graphics and … Continue reading →