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’ve started my first project for Riverglen Press: Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, in Latin. It’ll be a learner’s edition, for printing out and translating. I’m working off the Project Gutenberg text. Right now I’m in a bit of a rush, but here’s a tentative layout I threw together in Illustrator (subject to change, of course): 95 Theses. Next week sometime I’ll finish it up in InDesign. (I imagine it won’t take too long.)

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.

As for Riverglen Press, things are coming along slowly but surely. I’m deciding what font to use for the body text for my Riverglen Classics — probably Garamond Premier Pro or Minion Pro, I think. The main thing now is to learn enough Perl that I can process the Project Gutenberg text into something more usable for InDesign… (And I don’t think it’s all that much Perl, by the way.) With the Pride and Prejudice text, emphasized text is marked by underscores (”It’s _him!_” = “It’s him!“), and I wonder if there’s a way to turn that into something InDesign will automatically read in as italics. Probably not. But it would be nice if there were… Oh well, there aren’t enough of them to make it a huge nuisance. (I hope. )

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.

Okay, I’m getting really excited about this classics project. I went on Project Gutenberg’s websites and found that they only have a little over 100 PDFs (118, I think), and all of the ones I looked at were…less than satisfactory. Most likely machine-generated, in fact. And while I can see why they’d want to do that (it’s fast and easy), it’s not beautiful, not by a long shot. Beauty has to be handcrafted.

So, the process will go something like this: take a PG text (I’m going to start with Pride & Prejudice), run it through Perl to prepare it for entering into InDesign, and then design it in InDesign. I’ll produce two editions of each book: one for onscreen viewing (pages in sequential order), and one for printing (I just discovered InBooklet, which will let me do the impositions so the pages get printed where they need to be). I thought about designing each book differently, and that’s still a possibility, but I think this’ll be more of a “Modern Library” kind of thing (all in a set). Time to come up with a name for this new virtual press… Oh, and these will be downloadable for free, of course. I don’t care about money at all. (Which is why I’ll be poor till the end of my days, of course, but at least I’ll be happy.)

As for selection of texts, like I said, I’ll start with Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. From there I think I’ll move to lesser known texts, however. My second book will be George MacDonald’s Phantastes, and I’ll probably continue on with some of his other books (The Princess and the Goblin, etc.). I’d also like to do some foreign-language editions — Old English, Coptic, Latin, stuff like that. But that will have to wait.

In my History of the Book class today, a riveting idea took hold of me: take Project Gutenberg texts (of classics) and make them into beautiful books with InDesign, and put them up for download as PDFs on my website. Why? It’s nice to have freely available versions of the classics that are beautiful as well (and could be printed out if one so desires), and it’s good practice for book design. The texts are out of copyright and the texts are set (i.e., I don’t have to edit them), so all I’ll have to do is design them (copyfitting and all that), and that doesn’t take nearly as much time. I can’t wait!