Tag Archives: pdf

Class Project MacDonald’s Light Princess free book

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In the new video course, InDesign CC Book Production, Putting the book together, one of the books actually produced is a Class Project MacDonald’s Light Princess. The Light Princess is a delightful, whimsical fairy tale by one of the major influences of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald. The cover is simply a book designer’s bit of humor. I thought you might like to have a copy to read. By clicking on the cover or the link in … Continue reading →

Page Layout Part 5: Graphic needs of the formats

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Graphic needs for Print, PDF, ePUB, & Kindle KFX For book publishing, what you need to understand about graphics is how usage varies in the different formats. You’ll need to hand-adjust to produce the graphics for the various formats. Automation causes many problems. I’m just going to list the four options and their requirements, best formats, and so on. Greyscale print with color cover Lulu & Createspace, plus professional on-demand like Lightning source: You need to be careful. … Continue reading →

New Release: Writing In InDesign CC 2014 Producing Books, more than an update

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CC 2014 virtually redid ePUB export—adding fixed layout & radically improving reflowable ePUBs Indesign has always been the best software for publishing: print & ebook. I have already posted quite a bit about the new software. Most of the improvements seemed to be focused on we self-publishers. But my book is also redone— in places quite radically. A review by Mary Campagna Findley for the CS6 version “David Bergland has challenged me to think beyond the writing, editing, and cover design … Continue reading →

InDesign CC 2014 Reflowable ePUBs are even better

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Although the large changes in ePUB export are seen in the fixed layout variety, what they now call reflowable ePUBs are also improved. They have their own dialog box and they are a separate choice when you export. You now add the metadata in the export reflowable ePUB dialog box. This saves time and hassle. Our control over placed graphics is much better, as long as you stay within the rules. Inline graphics are all rasterized or … Continue reading →

New Release: Writing In InDesign CC Producing Books

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Released, January 15, 2014 for InDesign CC9.2 By now many of the sites have listed the book. As usual, we are still waiting for iBooks approval. But it’s up at Amazon in print and Kindle. Kobo has it listed. The rest are all in process. The best option for ebooks is the link below where you can get an archive with a downlaodable PDF plus a DRM-free ePUB with fonts embedded. This will enable you to load … Continue reading →

Graphics In InDesign: an excerpt from “Practical Professional Self Publishing Handbook”

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This is the first portion of the new Practical Professional Self Publishing Handbook due out before summer this year. InDesign is the true replacement for FreeHand Many designers are still upset that Adobe took FreeHand off the market. We remain convinced that FreeHand was a far superior vector drawing program to Illustrator. Actually, I bring good news. InDesign is actually more closely related to FreeHand than it is to Illustrator. Ole Kvern and I have commented on this many … Continue reading →

Books, even ebooks, need good tools (InDesign CS6)

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No! You can’t do it in BBEdit or Word It all comes back to the print/ebook divide. That divide is only apparent to the book designers. For the readers, a book is a book. Ebooks are cheaper (or should be). Normal printed books are high resolution, typographic marvels. But to the reader, a book is a book. For authors, publishing only a print version or only an ebook version is worse than silly—it’s foolish. If you want … Continue reading →

Starting at the beginning: Document Setup…

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This is the dialog box which opens when you choose New from the file menu or type Command+N. Many of the choices found in this dialog box are based on your experience. I’ll use my current choices, just so we can talk about the issues involved. The first choice is that I always start with print chosen as my intent. There are many reasons for this. But I can state it simply as I start out. Print … Continue reading →

Setting up your book to be read: page layout

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Page layout basics One of the more daunting aspects of book design for the inexperienced is page layout. Most people have Word experience and as I have said countless times already—Word cannot do professional page layout. In fact, it is worse than that because Word’s feeble attempts give you bad habits and poor expectations—which must be corrected. Many settings have to be covered for every document. Many of these are set up as you go through the … Continue reading →

Sale at Lulu until Friday

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Your readers can save by going to Lulu.com, between now and Friday, July 13th. The cost of this promotion is on us, but only for a limited time, so hurry for your chance to save big! Just go toLulu.com to see your savings. Visit Lulu.com to find your store-specific coupon code. How does this promotion work? Go to Lulu.com. On our homepage, we will have the name of a savings coupon that they can add to their cart to save. This promotion ends … Continue reading →