- Specimen book for Buddy August 24, 2010
- New release! Buddy: the sans companion to Contenu August 24, 2010
- Classes mess up Opentype Glyph generation August 9, 2010
- A history of the alphabet August 9, 2010
- Going after the look of old fonts? Not likely August 7, 2010
Category: Typography
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 this design go back to Minister which Monotype says has Garalde influence.
It is very conservative for me. I even went to a small bowl on the lowercase a. What’s the world coming to?
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 e-reader age, many from before the digital age entirely. That’s not what I am talking about either.
This is redesign not conversion
That’s the first thing you need to accept—like it or not. There is no way to convert a typographically excellent, graphically intensive book from PDF to ePub. There are too many limitations with ePub. Here’s a list of the things you’ll need to get rid of as you make the conversion:
- Fonts: All you have to work with are a limited portion of the originally limited Web palette of fonts
- Vector graphics: at this point you need to convert everything to JPEG.
- Anchored graphics: Everything must be inline.
- Columns: This is all single column stuff.
- Nested styles: You’ll need to hand format run-in heads with character styles
- Styles in general: Depending on who you use to distribute your masterpiece, you’ll probably need to convert to the H1-6, p, ol, ul choices of HTML [I'm thinking Kindle here].
It’ s a very different way of thinking
I keep on hearing that some types of books will not convert. That’s not true. What is true is that some designers are not willing to work within the given limitations as we wait for our options to improve. For one of my new bloggin acquaintances, I made a couple of comparison pieces [PDF vs. ePub] this morning. I thought you might want to take a look and see what I had to change. Yes, the ePub version is hideous. But, it is selling as well as the PDF version—though the printed version is still outselling both.
The PDF sample • The ePub sample
Does this miss the mark for you?
What experiences are you having that suggest my choices are bad or wrong?
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 to move components with multiple shift+right arrows or to go to the mouse and shift+drag. I’ve used both over the years, but they are both frustrating.
Again to review, the arrow key moves one unit and the shift+arrow key moves ten units. I just accidently found that the Command+arrow moves the selection 100 units. What a great timesaver!
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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 place it, hit the shortcut and then insert it into the text where you need it. It will automatically be anchored and offset as you designed it.
Let’s make a style to automatically offset a frame into the sidebar area next to the column on a single column page
Make a new Object style with all the options turned off . Turn on Anchored Object and set it up like you see below. We’re assuming a four-inch column on a 7.5″ wide page. You can adjust to fit your page size.
Basic settings for an anchored object
TIP: Once you have your anchored style set up the way you like, save the document you are working on.
Then close all documents and go to the Object Styles palette (with no document open). Choose Load Object Styles… from the Option Menu and add the new object style from the document you just saved and closed. Close InDesign and reopen it to save your new application default.
From then on, all new documents will have this style available. In most cases, all you will have to do it modify the offsets to make it work for any new project.
Believe me, you’ll use this (or your version of it) a lot!
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 object styles.
That hour included checking every page for orphans and widows and fixing all of them. That meant eliminating all paragraph fragments of two lines or less and all paragraph ending sentence fragments of two and a partial word or less.
The procedure
- Turn on Layout Adjustment… under the Layout menu in InDesign
- Change the page size in Document setup… under the file menu
- Change the margins in Margins and Columns… under the Layout menu
- Adjust the paragraph styles, character styles, and object styles
- Proof new layout from page 1 to the end eliminating orphans and widows
Like I said, it took less than a hour to convert a 540 page book. It was really fun. Yes, it was a novel we’re publishing for a new author in Peralta, New Mexico. But it doesn’t take much longer for a graphically intensive book like Practical Font Design.
I ran across this in my Christian professionals group at Linked In this morning. It is a visually exciting presentation to be sure. My only question is:
Can it really be used?
I saw no place to add notes, new crossreferences or any of the other things necessary for a real study bible. I’ve included a scan of one of the pages in one of my bibles to show you what I mean.
It may be that Glo can handle this, but I couldn’t find it in the promo pieces on their fancy Website.
It is gorgeous though—unlike this bible that has actually been used. I’ve got to admit I’m suspicious when they don’t give you the version and the typography looks so bad on the screen. I’m afraid it’s NIT or worse.
My guess is (judging by past history) that Zondervan has it locked down tighter than a drum so it can’t really be used as a teaching tool.
A used study bible
A List Apart: Articles: Reading Design.
I read this last night. It’s an excellent article on the importance of the content and its presentation. Of course, I like it because I agree with it. But you should find it an entertaining and thought provoking read also.
Among other things, Dean discusses the pressures to focus on the design without ever reading the copy. Don’t do that. Read the article.
A journey with an experienced font designer through the creation of a new OpenType font developed for release. This is also part of the training materials for the apprentices of the Hackberry Font Foundry.
That’s the blurb on Lulu. This is the first limited release on my Practical Font Design book. It is limited because it’s done on FontLab 4.6 and FontLab 5 has been out for quite a while.
As you know, Hackberry Fonts is a low-budget operation so David has simply not had the capital to invest in the latest version of FontLab. When that happens, we will be releasing a major effort (probably with ISBN#s and everything). However, I’m not sure we’ll bother with ISBNs there either because it makes the books twice as expensive for little added benefit to the reader.
We believe the book is helpful to graphic designers who are thinking about dipping their toe in the waters of font design.
This is now completely Bergsland Typography: my font foundry. At present, most of my work and income comes from font designs. This is a growing area of my work and needs a separate site to handle all the goings on. This blog services that site.