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A Sphere Maker’s Craft
by Robert F. Ritchie, 2009
This is a 160 page+ technical manual illustrating specialized techniques for cutting spheres. The book includes over 80 photographs and tables and an extensive index.
The author, who is located in Portland, ME, worked with me almost entirely by email. We had a long correspondance over whether the subject would best be handled by a website with pdf downloads of specific topics, or by a printed book. Once he decided on a book, we discussed binding options. Perfect binding is inexpensive and allows the option of ‘on demand’ printing, but a spiral binding allows the book to lay flat, which is much more useful for a manual someone might refer to while they worked. The author eventually chose a comb bind, which also allows the book to lie flat but is less expensive than metal spiral binding.
The author mailed me a CD with a Microsoft Word document and the images, along with a printout with the images glued into their approximate locations within the text. Once I began the rough layout, I noticed inconsistencies in the section numbering and text. This was hard to see in his original Word document, but apparent once I set the headers in different typefaces and sizes and generated the first table of contents using the actual text (he had created the original TOC manually, and it did not match his final edits). I created design samples with different options for the typefaces, header and footer styles, etc. for him to choose from.
We went back and forth quite a bit on the index, which took almost 15% of the total project time. He had painstakingly created an index for his Word document by manually finding the entries he wanted to include and typing their page numbers into a separate document. However, as he edited the book some of those page numbers changed, and of course when the book was being typeset, almost all the rest of the pages shifted. Since he had not used Word’s indexing functions to create the index, I had to go back through the book page by page trying to find the text which related to each page number he listed in the original manually created index.
There were minor issues with the images. We had discussed the need for all images to be CMYK at 300 dpi or better, but a few arrived as RGB. However, that was a small detail to fix; overall the image quality was quite good, and they reproduced well in print.
The text document he sent was average in terms of the formatting I’ve seen when an author uses Microsoft Word. However, the technical nature of the material, number of sections and subsections, and extensive index made quite a bit of work on the typesetting end to clean everything up. Much of that would have been eliminated if he had made use of the style sheets, TOC and indexing functions in Word, but few people really know how to use these tools.
The finished book looks very nice. Since there were color images on more than half the pages, there was no cost savings in keeping the text black. As a result, I was able to use color in the various headings and subheaders and to highlight figure numbers, index entries and cross references within the text.
I can’t speak to the technical value of the material. However, from a design standpoint the information is organized in a clear and easy to follow fashion, while the use of color in the text visually separates the content. Overall, we’re both happy with the finished result.