Putting together a book

[Howdya do that]

Hi All,

I am putting together a book on the 25 year of our rugby club in microsoft word.
The file is becoming very large hence it takes ages to load and scroll through because of all the text and pictures.

Word Help is telling me to reduce the resolution of the pictures but I dont know how far I can reduce them and maintain enough quality?

I expect to finish up with about 300 pages and 150 to 200 photographs, any tips on handling a document this size would be appreciated.

[echnidna]

break the chapters up into separate documents

[woodbe]

Bob is right.

The last thing you want to do is to start trashing the resolution of the photos.

Word bogs down on big docs, programs like Pagemaker and Quark Express would be the go, but they cost a lot.

woodbe.

[Geoff Dean]

Word Help is telling me to reduce the resolution of the pictures but I dont know how far I can reduce them and maintain enough quality?

I expect to finish up with about 300 pages and 150 to 200 photographs, any tips on handling a document this size would be appreciated.

From a printing point of view it would be best if you went and spoke to the printers you will be using before too much longer. I manage a prepress department for a reasonable size printer, and one of the biggest problems we have is clients turning up with a document that has taken them mega hours to produce, only to find that it is next to useless.

I would expect that your book would be case bound, and printed on a good quality stock, a similar example which we are producing 1500 copies of with around 400 pages will end up costing around $30,000 ($20 each) to manufacture.

DO NOT reduce resolution of pics. They should be 300dpi at 100%. Enlarging pics in word has the same effect as reducing resolution, so a 300dpi pic placed at 200% has an effective resolution of 150dpi.

Your printer may also require the file to be supplied as a PDF, this can create some problems, but can also eliminate a lot of problems.

By having a chat to them as early as you can, you will find that you could possibly save yourself a lot of heart ache and time, and possibly a few $$$ as well.

IF you want to PM me I will try to answer as many of your questions as I can, but NOTHING beats talking to the printers who will be doing your job.:D

Good Luck with it, I know how much effort is involved in this type of project.

[Big Shed]

From an editing point of view, echnidna has the right idea. Break it up into chapters, much easier to handle that way.

[arose62]

Use styles!

I did quite a few theses for students in my early IT days, and found that getting my head around Styles was the biggest time, effort and sanity saver!

Big documents can be handled by "master documents" and "subdocuments".

I'll butt out about the pictures, as you're already getting better and more specific help than I could give.

But, I'll jump up and down about Styles being A Good Thing.

And, two reference books that I highly recommend are:

"The PC is not a Typewriter"
and
the NSW Govt Style Guide.

Cheers,
Andrew

[echnidna]

If your printer wants your document in PDF,
download a copy of Open Office, its FREE,
and you can save in PDF as well as Word Doc Format.
It will open woprd docs too so you won't have to duplicate the work you have done.

[Barry_White]

If you want to create PDF documents without Adobe go here. http://www.cutepdf.com/

[Studley 2436]

Indesign is worth a look. It is part of the Adobe Creative Suite but I've heard has for several years now been the software of choice over Quark for putting books together.

Studley

[Howdya do that]

Thanks All,

I have spoken to a printer and got it sorted.
It will need to be in pdf format - I have acrobat writer
He said to make the pictures low res in the document and provide copies on disk.

Thanks again

[Master Splinter]

With the pictures, it is imperative that you have sufficient resolution - otherwise your pics will get printed and look all "blocky".

In Windows, the way to tell the maximum printed size of a pic is to wait for the little information box to appear when you mouse-over it.

This box will show the dimensions (in pixels) of the image. Divide these numbers by 300, to get the maximum size in inches that the pic can be printed in.

In the example below, the dimensions are 3,456 x 2,304 pixels - this means the maximum size it can be printed in is 11.5 x 7.6 inches, or just a bit smaller than A4 size.

My quick rule of thumb is that any jpg that's smaller than about 500k in file size won't be any good for commercial print (unless its going to be passport pic sized).

[Neil]

first thing I'd do is get it out of Word and into a Desk Top Publishing program like Microsoft Publisher (dead easy to use), Page Maker or any thing other than Word which isn't a DTP, it will make it a hell of a lit easier to manage as you can see exactly what a page will look like and manipulate it with ease.

Do yourself a favor and try it. You may have to save the pages a .rtf or .txt to get them out of Word and into Publisher or whatever you decide to use but I can guarantee you won't regret the change.

You can also have all your graphics loaded at full hi res rather than lo res and it won't slow down the running of the program in the slightest. you can manipulate the whole thing in seconds and do a lot more than you ever thought possible in Word.

Cheers - Neil :2tsup:

PS Publisher is the most user friendly DTP program and will make your pdf's without a problem. Just click on print and change the printer to Adobe PDF the rest is automatic.

[Geoff Dean]

first thing I'd do is get it out of Word and into a Desk Top Publishing program like Microsoft Publisher (dead easy to use), Page Maker or any thing other than Word which isn't a DTP, it will make it a hell of a lit easier to manage as you can see exactly what a page will look like and manipulate it with ease.

Do yourself a favor and try it. You may have to save the pages a .rtf or .txt to get them out of Word and into Publisher or whatever you decide to use but I can guarantee you won't regret the change.

You can also have all your graphics loaded at full hi res rather than lo res and it won't slow down the running of the program in the slightest. you can manipulate the whole thing in seconds and do a lot more than you ever thought possible in Word.

Cheers - Neil :2tsup:

PS Publisher is the most user friendly DTP program and will make your pdf's without a problem. Just click on print and change the printer to Adobe PDF the rest is automatic.

Hate to disagree, Neil, but as someone who has to deal with publisher files professionally, this program is THE VERY WORST PROGRAM from a printers point of view.

I have yet to come across 1 printer that has a good word for it. It does not handle graphics or text very well from a pre press point of view, and is probably the most basic DTP program going around.

Most printers have to spend almost as long making the file usable, as it took to create, and generally can't recover the cost.

Quite a few also put a premium charge on files that are created by publisher to cover the extra labor.

There are also a few who just let it run as it is, and you end up with a job that is sub standard.

Unfortunately those clients that are very cost sensitive, are usually the most demanding when it comes to quality, and believe they are being ripped off when told there will be an extra charge to "fix" their file.

There is an old saying that you can't make strawberry jam out of pig poo, no matter how much sugar you put in, and there is not enough sugar to make Publisher anything other than the pig poo that it is.

Pagemaker has not been upgraded for about 5 years now, and is not much better than Publisher. It has been replaced with Indesign, which along with Quark are the 2 programs of choice for the design/publishing/printing industries...but they come at a price...InDesign @ $1099 and Quark @ $1330, which I know is unfortunately out of a lot of peoples price range.

But they are like comparing a $5 no name square or a magnificent 8" Colen Clenton square for $190 (which I just happened to pick up at the Melb WWW Show.)

If you are going to use the software for more than just doing your own business cards that you print out on your home computer, then it is at least worth considering. For a 400 page case bound book, that will run to around $30,000 for 1500 copies, it is not much of an extra cost.::U

[Gra]

Slightly off topic, but are there any good open source DTP programs?

[Wood Butcher]

Open Office is fairly good. It has most of the functionality of Microsloth Office.

Howdya, for your predicament I would use a Master document and sub documents like Arose mentioned. Basically your create each of the chapters in a separate file and then create a master document to collate all of the chapters. With the master document you cxan choose whether or not to display the sub-documents, increasing viewing speeds.

I will have a dig through my teaching notes and see if I can find the bits relating to sub-documents tonight if you like.

[echnidna]

In some ways Open Office has more functionality than ms office.

You could for example save each chapter or section as a pdf then combine all the pdf's with something like "PDF Split-Merge" from verypdf.com

[ubeaut]

We do everything through Publisher. I've had printers say it is crap, useless, won't tough it, not interested, etc, etc.

I found a printer who would look at my files and he was amazed. We send everything to him via the internet, pre formatted in .pdf form through a third party pdf courier. This way we lose no quality keep all the formatting, have no problems with font etc. Mostly it just gets put into the rip and printed with maybe a couple of minutes to set up the A5 book to print on A3 other than that it is pretty much a seamless process.

I do it all myself and over the last 15 yrs have tried a number of other programs with a lot less success, a lot more hard work and stress setting them up and no where near as good a result.

Up until 2 1/2 years ago we had over $75,000 worth of printing done by this guy each year for 5 years, because he opened his mind to something else. That's over $1,400 a week that this person would never have had if it wasn't for Publisher. This saved us around $15-20.000 per year on what we had formerly been spending.

Now we print everything except for the book in house at a saving of around $26,000 a year. We have the ability to print the book (including Guillotine, binder, etc) but not the time, so leave that with the printer, but all our labels brochures, info sheets etc are done in house and with the new printer I picked up today I will be able to print around 1,500 of our new wrap around, full colour, high gloss, labels in 10 minutes. I can print 5,880 of the old labels in the same time. All from publisher. Sorry bragging a bit here, but hey I'm a new dad so I'm aloud.

Publisher may not be the best, but I still believe it's a far better alternative to Word for a book, especially a self published one. It's also readily available, reasonably cheap (compared to others) and is extremely easy to use. Some others almost require a uni degree to use (might be better now but they weren't a few years ago when I dumped them all for what works seamlessly for me).

It can be made into rather fine strawberry jam if you are prepared to do it all yourself and do it right.

I like it. It works exceptionally well for me. It works equally well for my printer. It will work well for others too if they are given the right stuff to work with in the first place and not pig poo.

Cheers - Neil :U

PS Most printers will disagree but then again there are quite a few still using antiquated printing methods.

[Barry_White]

I would like to put a word in for Publisher also. Like Neil says it is easy to use very functional and as he says readily available. I use it as a Cad program and I can produce drawings equally as good as any cad program. I use it for business cards, brochures etc that I print myself.

[Chris Parks]

A bit off the subject, if you ever have the need to produce an electronic book try this...

http://flipalbum.com/fahome/

I had the need to produce a book with the original documents on one page and the english translation on the facing page and used FA. Fairly intuitive and nice to use for those reading it, just like a real book.

[bitingmidge]

If you are only going to do a small run, the best way I have found of publishing books thus far is Blurb (http://www.blurb.com).

It takes about ten days from order to delivery, and the print quality is up there. Download the software, and see if any of the templates work for you, it's dead easy to use, Pictures are printed at 300 dpi, however the templates simply tell you the optimum pixel size for each.

It's really publishing for dummies, but gives a professional result.

It's no substitute for the sort of printing Neil's doing, but I now do photo albums for instance as hard bound books. Cost for about 100 pages (usually I have over 200 pics in that size) hard bound with printed cover is around $40 AUD delivered.

That's a bit less than I used to pay for cloth binding here.

Cheers,

P
:D

[Sebastiaan56]

We do everything through Publisher. I've had printers say it is crap, useless, won't tough it, not interested, etc, etc.

I found a printer who would look at my files and he was amazed. We send everything to him via the internet, pre formatted in .pdf form through a third party pdf courier. This way we lose no quality keep all the formatting, have no problems with font etc. Mostly it just gets put into the rip and printed with maybe a couple of minutes to set up the A5 book to print on A3 other than that it is pretty much a seamless process.

As the proprieter of a print shop I have to agree with Geoff. What you have done is perfect Neil, PDF is the way to go nowadays, there are a bunch of converters all with their own strengths and weaknesses. PDF995 is good and free.

Sebastiaan