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

1. Turn on Layout Adjustment… under the Layout menu in InDesign
2. Change the page size in Document setup… under the file menu
3. Change the margins in Margins and Columns… under the Layout menu
4. Adjust the paragraph styles, character styles, and object styles
5. 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.

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