After a couple of hours of work, I’ve finished the Latin edition of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses and made it downloadable at Riverglen Press. There are actually two versions: the learner’s edition has large print and lots of extra space for making notes between the lines (as well as in the margins); the reader’s edition is normal book-size print and is meant for reading, not necessarily notetaking (though the margins still give plenty of room for that).

Now that I’ve actually gotten something up, I’ll start work on Pride & Prejudice. And I’ll dig up the Thai script card I made in the mission office and upload it, too…

I just tried installing my fonts (just Minion and Myriad) onto the lab computer so I could use them in InDesign, and it worked. This makes me very happy. And the nice thing is that it automatically deletes them when I log out, so I don’t have to do that myself.

I made a quick test PDF of a page from Pride & Prejudice and it turned out lovely. So now I just need to decide on a format… (By the way, in Bringhurst’s book — The Elements of Typographic Style — there’s a great section on page size and textblock size and all that. I highly recommend it.)

Today in my History of the Book class we talked about textual criticism, particularly that of the Book of Mormon (my professor, Royal Skousen, is the one doing the critical text of the Book of Mormon). I’d expected it to be dry and boring, but to my surprise I found it quite fascinating. Definitely something I’m going to have to look more into. (Part of my interest has to do with Riverglen Press and its future — I’d love to do editions of texts which I’ve actually edited, in a scholarly manner. ) And now I find myself with a desire to make a learner’s edition of the Latin Vulgate (which would work in perfectly with my class next fall). The Vulgate’s got to be public domain, but the trick is finding a public domain text of it (preferably without having to type it all in by hand, but I’ve done that before and I’ll do it again).

As for Riverglen Press, I’m going to see if I can copy the fonts I use (Minion, Myriad, etc.) to my flash drive and temporarily install them on these Macs when I use InDesign. In theory it should work, and if it does, I can start working on texts immediately. (And if it doesn’t, then when we get the iMac at work, I can come in before or after hours and use that. If I get InDesign installed on it, that is…)

After being sick for almost a week now, I’ve decided to start doing homework so that I’ll be caught up when I finally do get better. For my History of the Book class, we’ve started reading Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, which is an amazing book. No typographer should be without it.

And on page 42, I came across this: “No typesetting software should be permitted to compress, expand or letterspace the text automatically and arbitrarily as a means of fitting the copy. Copyfitting problems should be solved by creative design, not fobbed off on the reader and the text nor cast like pearls before machines.” Them’s strong words, there. And I agree. Yesterday when I wrote that auto-PDF post, I originally was dead-set against it and was going to write about why human-crafted is better. But something got the better of me. That something is now gone (whatever it was), and I won’t be casting my lot with any automatically generated PDF crowd any time soon. Book design is an art.

Today I read about the Reading 2.0 conference, and it’s very interesting stuff. For good summaries of the main talks, see Tim O’Reilly’s notes.

On a somewhat related note, I’m wondering about how worthwhile it is to be able to produce PDFs on-the-fly from a text/HTML/XML source. As far as beauty goes, you could get a decent approximation provided that you made sure it did copyfitting and avoided widows and orphans and so on. And that’s possible. It could never have all the charm of a human-designed book, but I suppose it would do — like the utilitarian perfect binding vs. the far more aesthetic sewn binding.

It’s done! Translating Scripture is back from the press and I’m pretty impressed with the result — it’s just like it’s supposed to look. Phew! It’s crazy to see the months of work in InDesign come to fruition in a real, physical book I can hold in my hand. Bookmaking is getting even more addicting. (And in my History of the Book class today, we got to see a bunch of the fine printing books in Special Collections. Mmm.) I’ve been thinking about Riverglen Press and I realized that I probably won’t be satisfied only with making PDFs — I have to make real books, too. And so I will, eventually. In the meantime, PDFs will have to suffice. Speaking of which, I wrote a quick Perl script today which takes a Project Gutenberg eBook and fixes it up so InDesign can take it and use it. I just noticed that InDesign can import XML, though, so I’m going to look into that and see if I can give InDesign formatting codes via XML — if I can, then I can change the underscored italics in the ASCII into InDesign italics, all automatically. That’d be nice.

Hmm, I’m tempted to get to work on Sean Crist’s image files of Bosworth and Toller (an Old English dictionary) and turn the data into a searchable database, but alas, I have not enough time and too many projects.

At a second glance, it looks like someone’s already done it (there’s a search link on the site), but the page returns a 404. Oh well. ~sigh~

It’s done! I finished up Translating Scripture, exported the whole thing to PDF, and sent it to the author, who’ll take it to the press tomorrow morning on CD. It’s a great feeling to be done — I’ve been working on the book for the past few months, and these past two weeks have been intense. I guess I’d better start doing homework again…

Now that I’m done, it’s time to move to my next project: the Project Gutenberg eBooks. I’ve got to balance my time between this and Beyond, though. And yet I don’t think it’ll be much of a problem — these texts won’t be too hard to set. Eventually I want to set Middle English and Old English and Latin and Coptic texts (and texts in other languages, too), perhaps learner’s editions that people can print out and take notes on (wide margins, lots of space between lines, etc.). I’m even thinking that I may do a Bible someay, just because all the old printers did them.

But not quite yet. We moved the deadline to tomorrow morning so we could review the book (Translating Scripture) again and fix any remaining problems. As soon as we send it to press I’m sure the inevitable dread will set in — what if there’s some glaringly obvious error we missed? Oh well. You can only do so much.

As for my Project Gutenberg typesetting project, I think I’m going to call it Quire Press. (From Answers.com, a quire is “A collection of leaves of parchment or paper, folded one within the other, in a manuscript or book.”) I came up with a preliminary regular expression in vim to fix the lines (%s/\n\([A-Za-z]\)/\1/g) but it’s not quite perfect yet. (And besides, I want to do it in Perl.) Pride and Prejudice will be the first book I produce and Phantastes (George MacDonald) will be the second.

Today is pretty much the final day for Translating Scripture — we’re sending it to press on Monday. All the formatting is done, so we’re down to just last-minute changes. And I’m redoing the transliteration system, and I’ve got to find out how to make an authentic copyright page.

Other than that, I stopped by the library for twenty minutes earlier today and sat down in the reading room with a copy of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. The first chapter was okay, but it wasn’t until the second that I started getting hooked. I fully intended to stop after the second, in fact, but I just had to read the third. And unfortunately I had to leave it in the reading room for a future date, for I still have to finish Jane Eyre. There are too many good books to read! A Tale of Two Cities is sitting on my desk waiting to be read, along with War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov. Someday…

[tags]bookmaking, Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence, Jane Eyre, Tale of Two Cities, War and Peace, Brothers Karamazov[tags/]