As someone who worked for years in commercial print, before most manufacturing moved overseas, I recall the workflows the article discusses as being more automate-able than the author seems to understand. For example, "Making the slightest change became a chore. [1.] Update the 'master' DOCX. [2.] Update the InDesign file ..." --the appropriate way to use an external document as master in InDesign is to use the Place command, which autoupdates text changes as they are made in Word. As another example, InDesign supports multiple formats of EPUB by direct export. I also question the author's familiarity with common LaTeX workflows. "'Why didn’t you just author it in LaTeX? ...' you might ask. [B]ut I prefer writing novels in a word processor, not a text editor." And, "How do I convert an ODT file to TeX?" Word processors offer exports of all kinds, including to plain text, and the purpose of a TeX editor is, like InDesign, to typeset text that is often written elsewhere. Capturing the styling from the word processor seems antithetical to the desire for an advanced typesetting tool.
Overall, as a technical writeup I enjoyed the article; however, I would caution that the author seems to approach publishing from an amateur perspective.
The place command does not autoupdate. At least not in the most recent version.
Text is either embedded, in which case it's baked in, or linked, in which case you have to manually tell ID to update the link to reload the text.
But InDesign's EPUB output is horrifically terrible, especially if you're trying to use custom fonts/graphics for page headings. (Basically - no.)
And the CSS is... really not great.
The best fiction off-the-shelf option for EPUB gen is Vellum. It's a one-off payment of around $250 and you can get an EPUB-only version, or EPUB+PDF for print. It's not very customisable, but the presets - there aren't many - all look good.
For anything more sophisticated, options are limited. I spent far too long creating a non-fiction EPUB in ID a couple of years ago. I got there in the end but it was an extremely painful process and I ended up automating a lot of the workflow in JSX.
For fiction I created my own MD -> EPUB pipeline with a custom MD -> HTML parser for custom markup not handled by pure MD. Then a custom EPUB builder which does all the wrapping and general EPUB bureaucracy based on my own CSS.
Python has libraries for Pandoc, native DOCX, and MD (up to a point) so the basics were all there. The rest was glue.
It was a moderately-sized hobby project - would probably go much faster with AI now.
> Overall, as a technical writeup I enjoyed the article; however, I would caution that the author seems to approach publishing from an amateur perspective.
I also worked at a publishing company (for ~6 years) in the early 2000s. While you are right that the pros have some tricks to make the process easier, the fact remains that the process is not easy at all. Unlike in academic publishing, where nothing stands between the author and the reader, at a commercial publishing company (at least one of the majors), there are legions of people working behind the scenes. Editors communicate with authors; editorial assistants help the editors with fact-checking, drafts, basic organization and comprehensibility; copyeditors get all pedantic about formatting and word choice (sometimes resulting in arguments with authors that the editors need to smooth over); production departments that make the books look pretty, contain images whose copyrights are cleared and that can be legibly printed within a reasonable budget; graphic designers who develop house styles or even a custom style for a book and even original cover art; lawyers who negotiate copyrights for excerpts, images, and other ancillary materials; and on and on.
I know all this because I worked on a custom content management system for this company and in so doing I discovered that the process was incredibly complex. One of the major pet peeves of everybody involved was when an author thought they were doing anybody a favor by trying format things in Microsoft Word. Most of that information was thrown away and the real layout was done by people who thought in terms of widows, orphans, kerning, and leading (and so on). Once you know what all the people in a top publishing company do, the difference between an amateur publication and a professional one becomes immediately apparent. So I don't fault the author for getting a bit technical. The SE approach sounds like an epic attempt to make a complicated subject at least somewhat approachable.
I am firmly convinced that the customary mapping of widow/orphan is back to front. You’re really trying to convince me that the one that has been cut off from its antecedents is the widow? It should obviously be the orphan.
So, no wonder people confuse them, because the popular mapping is wrong.
Yes! All the typographical techniques and terminology is fascinating (and confusing at times). Widow and orphan control really fight against text justification. Finding the right balance is tricky, but LaTeX has all the little knobs to tweak and find what's right for your uses (fiction for me).
> Once you know what all the people in a top publishing company do, the difference between an amateur publication and a professional one becomes immediately apparent.
Any advise for developing this sense?
I will never work in a top publishing company but I have been able to approximate good design by first studying the fundamentals, then reproducing the layouts I see in popular media. I can make text into a beautiful book, and I see poor design choices in the corporate communication billion dollar companies.
But it feels like there’s a lot more I don’t know, and you never know what you don’t know, and it makes me wish I could absorb more from working under an expert.
There's no substitute for apprenticeship (by whatever name). Unfortunately, skills of this kind may be close to extinction. For someone like you just interested in getting better at layout design, I'd recommend something like 'The Elements of Typographic Style', by Bringhurst; this concentrates mostly on books, but much applies to other layouts. Of more general interest -- i.e., beyond layout design -- might be 'An Encyclopedia of the Book', by Glaister. There's a wealth of valuable design and print resources from the '60s - '90s if you can find them -- some libraries still have high-quality examples, but most have replaced them with much less-valuable contemporary resources. Look for book and magazine sales by university departments, businesses, etc.
Thank you! I have been absorbing Bringhurst methodically the past year.
I had not heard of Glaister, will be on the lookout.
Good point about library and corporate sales. My main supply of materials from the 60s has been from estate sales -- not for instructional materials, but for well composed period pieces. Older letterfaces and color palettes are so evocative; seeing the label of a 70 year old oil can with so much more personality than the products of today makes me want to bottle this style for my own future use. And it feels good to hold something back from the landfill.
The trouble with our age is that, despite the abundance of intermediate-level information, expert teachers in specific, and shrinking, professions are as hard as ever to access, if not more so.
When we get a Word doc from an author it is sent to the typesetter for reformatting. A standard set of style codes is applied and other corrections made so it can be directly imported into the design template. This the version the copyeditor works on. Also: once proofs are set this version is basically trash. In ye olde dayes, when this was all done on paper, the edited ms would eventually go back to the author, but sometimes they didn't want it. Now when the book is done the production manuscript files get deleted.
For ebook production, you could definitely do worse than follow Standard Ebooks' method. That will get you a decent standards-compliant file with basic accessibility features accounted for.
> For example, "Making the slightest change became a chore. [1.] Update the 'master' DOCX. [2.] Update the InDesign file ..." --the appropriate way to use an external document as master in InDesign is to use the Place command, which autoupdates text changes as they are made in Word.
It does not auto-update. Even if it did, you wouldn't necessarily want it to auto-update, because it's very hard to tell if changing one sentence in your manuscript has borked the layout of dozens of pages. Once you have rules set up around widow and orphan control, it's very easy for even tiny text changes to have large downstream layout effects.
Also, frankly, InDesign is kind of flaky and will sometimes change layout or make other visual changes in response to apparently nothing at all. I ran into a bug where it would just silently drop underlines on some elements and jiggling them a bit would bring them back.
For my two books, I ended up writing a script that would generate a visual diff of the entire book from the PDF export of the InDesign files so that I could tell for certain if InDesign had gotten itself confused. InDesign can produce beautiful output, but like a lot of Adobe software, it's temperamental and opaque.
For my part, my approach was to set up a Word .docx file with styles, which would import into Adobe InDesign, mapping style-to-style, and if need be, pre-process w/ one or more AppleScripts and page as normal, then when it was time to return the edited manuscript to the author(s), select all the text and remove over-rides and export the text as a .rtf from InDesign, open that in Microsoft Word and re-save as a .docx.
Amateur...you're probably right. It reminds me of my home improvement project I've been working on this evening: interior painting. My ceiling lines are probably perfect to houseguests (if they notice at all). But if a professional painter got up on a ladder and looked closely, he'd probably shake his head and chuckle.
As for InDesign and EPUB, I've found the auto-generated output not up to the standard I was after. Worse, I've seen output differ between InDesign versions, which scared me.
I have an acquaintance who works for a "Big 5" publisher, and he recounted their process to me once. In short, the indd file became the source of truth. They would generate an EPUB from it but then hand edit it for many hours to bring it up to their house style. If there was a text change (rare in fiction) they update the indd and EPUB separately. Going back to the Word file is basically non-existent. If the author, copyeditor, proofreader had more extensive changes (like a full revision), it was close to a brand new publication.
The visual styling from the word processer isn't interesting. It's the "tagging" that paragraph and character styles bring that's helpful. It's not dissimilar from an HTML class, which scripting can transform into truly semantic text. I hope that clarifies some points. BTW, it's pretty cool to hear from people in the real print industry. I'm always fascinated by their workflows.
Japanese conglomerates are relics of a handful of British businessmen's attempting to exploit and dominate Japan during the late colonial period. They did this outside the normal channels of conquest or statecraft, due to Japan's unique relationship to the world at the time.
I should go back to this (like some of the other comments suggest) - I think there is potential in suggesting multiple lines, and I would have really loved it to work, but it is clear that their ux testing was poor.
You get an Apple product. At least, for me it was that simple. The ThinkPad I had was pretty high end, and I was using polarized glasses and even a sun shade to work at the park while the girls played. Bought a MacBook and the screen seems to crisply outshine even the sunniest days -- I haven't had to worry about outdoor use since, to my recollection.
"Work" is human activity. For example, children's play is work. All living things desire to go about their lives. Well-adjusted humans desire to work. Note that this does not necessarily equate to jobs.
Of course it is. Play is a very basal behavior we see in a host of species among their young. Its biological role is to build up musculature and social bonding such that the individual will be strong enough and socialized enough to do what is required to survive among the colony/pack/tribe.
I'm sure there are still cohesive groupings of WASPs, if not large ones or effective at gatekeeping major institutions. --Still a meaningful trope, of course. But to bring it up to date you'd have to diversify, and include, for example, Indian social and professional-recruitment patterns.
Also, I do feel that GP's take is hyperbolic even in the twentieth century. My own background is mostly German immigrants, of various religions and non-religion, and the way I've been told the story none of them faced significant resistance as they moved upward in the various academic and corporate institutions of their choices. These included NASA executives, department heads, etc.
Note that in balancing GP's accusation against WASPs I'm not attempting to address the related, but not precisely complementary, phenomenon of perpetually marginalized groupings.
Overall, as a technical writeup I enjoyed the article; however, I would caution that the author seems to approach publishing from an amateur perspective.
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