How have things been revised: This piece you are reading did not appear first as a book in the traditional sense. These paragraphs were first released as the first posting of a new series on my blog, The Skilled Workman, in April of 2011. There was a link to a free downloadable PDF version at Scribd. The intention was a fully developed book after I was given the complete vision to share. I ended up with six of … Continue reading →
I was working on my best-selling book this morning, Practical Font Design, Third Edition. It’s an ePUB with 266 graphics in it—almost entirely screen captures—showing what I am doing in FontLab as I design a font. I design my ePUBs in InDesign CS6 & use the export unchanged I realize that’s anathema to many of you code geeks, but the ePUBs out of InDesign are now more than good enough—if you design within its limitations. Now that … Continue reading →
What skills do you need? The idea is that InDesign can be learned and you can become comfortable enough with the software so that it becomes an extension of your creativity. For example, as I started this chapter in the Writing In InDesign book, I hit the shortcut to set my headline. This started the chapter on the next odd page (which is the norm). When I wrote the headline and hit the Return key, InDesign changed to … Continue reading →
The greatly expanded and rewritten Writing In InDesign Second Edition has been released Buy it Now! Versions available so far Spiral-bound premium workbook $19.99 7×10 perfect-bound paperback $17.99 Kindle (with embedded fonts for Fire) $7.99 (Available in the Kindle Lending Library) What started as a relatively small update turned into a large scale revision when I began adapting my popular Writing In InDesign book to the responses and suggestions I received. I have been pleasantly surprised at all the people … Continue reading →
I spent much of last weekend designing a book in iBooks Author. It was a horrendous experience. But then the application wasn’t designed for my use. A book design tool for amateurs giving away free books First of all, I must mention that the process of dialing back from InDesign to less than Pages is a huge leap backwards. Like Liz Castro, I was excited about the possibilities suggested by the hype. She found ten reasons why … Continue reading →
The basic parts of type Again, we need some more basic language definitions. Without it, I can not help you in your ministry. You can see above how the point size of the type relates to the ascender, cap height, x-height, baseline, and descender. More importantly, you get a glimpse of things that are important in the world of typography. This illustration is from an introduction to typography in publishing found in Appendices A & B in … Continue reading →
Today I published a carefully constructed revision of the original 7×10 book as a 6×9 book on Lulu, Createspace, and Scribd. Due to a find and replace flaw in the original, many of the “we are”s were converted to I are and all the similar permutations that go with that kind of mental clumsiness. In the process, InDesign went through a spasm and damaged several of the images, so I fixed all of that. It does all … Continue reading →
Check out my page on the book This book has been replaced by “Writing In InDesign Revised Edition 2.5” This first edition, first formatting of the new book is no longer available available on Amazon. It includes many of the recent postings on this blog, plus more help for authors writing in InDesign (version 7.5 especially). I’m convinced that InDesign is best place to write. Read and find out why that is true and how it can … Continue reading →
ePUB CSS Repair Once you have your ePUB It will usually open in ADE (depending on what you have installed on your computer). Proof it carefully. Redo as necessary. If your computer is like mine, the graphics will be very poor in ADE. Basically ADE is very crude. Then drop a copy of the ePUB file onto iTunes and sync it into iBooks on your iPad to read it in iBooks. The reason you need to use … Continue reading →
There is nothing long and extended here, because I remain convinced that most book designers consider coding anathema. But after finding the script I mentioned earlier today, I have found several interesting things that can be easily fixed in the ePUB. Edit the CSS if you can (or don’t if you can’t) The problem with this has been the difficulty with decompressing the .epub file and then recompressing back into .epub. For that you will need a … Continue reading →