Seeking advice on monograph layout and related issues

[rleduc]

Hello All,

Well I have a draft of four out of five chapters of Rubble and Ruin and I am starting to worry about assembling the final monograph. I have a few questions and I would love to hear any advice the folks at this forum might have to offer.

Here they are (in no particular order, and with a certain amount of rambling):

1: font ownership. Chaosium says the authors must own the fonts in their works. I am using Arial and something called “OCR A Extended” both of which shipped on my laptop when I bought it. Anyone know if I can use these fonts? How do I find out?

2: Inexpensive clip art. DriveThrouRPG has lots of inexpensive clip art – most with commercial license but I can’t seem to find any with a post apocalyptic theme – anyone know of a good source for inexpensive PA artwork?

3: Everyone loves an index – but I’m a little intimidated by the prospect of putting one together. What do people think of an index to all the tables and lists and major headings only – for example an entry for each of the beasties in the monster section, and a listing for the “robot powers” list and the “automobile chasses” table – but not much more depth then that.

Thanks,

Rich

[Gundamentalist]

1: font ownership. Chaosium says the authors must own the fonts in their works. I am using Arial and something called “OCR A Extended” both of which shipped on my laptop when I bought it. Anyone know if I can use these fonts? How do I find out?

Some fonts can be embedded in PDFs, some can't. I'm guessing Chaosium want the former, because if they aren't, the words are displayed in a nasty system default.

Both the fonts you quote are default fonts on Windows machines, but may not be on Mac (or Linux) machines, so the PDF would display properly on a Windows machine but may not on anything else.

If the font is embedded in the PDF then it doesn't matter what fonts are installed on the reading machine, so it becomes platform independent.

Whether the font can be embedded depends on the licence for the font. Lots of those fonts you get on those huge CD-ROM font collections have been nobbled and you can't embed them. The ones you pay good money for from a font website generally can. But check the licence before you buy, just in case.

You can also check whether an installed font can be embedded by installing this (Windows only I'm afraid, no idea if such a thing exists for Macs, but I bet it does):

Font properties extension

HTH.

[rleduc]

Thanks – that worked great.

I have “editable embedding allowed” for both!

[neorxnawang]

Chaosium's printer wants (nay DEMANDS) a pdf-a compliant file. This means all fonts (including hidden text) embedded and a pile of other technical mumbo jumbo. I went round and round with the powers that be on this. And no rgb image files. And (I could go on)

The best thing to do is preflight the manuscript with Adobe. Or just send Chaosium a text document and hope they can do it.

In terms of illustrations for post-apoc, I used two basic sources:

1. The Library of Congress digital archive site (searchable, look for things like ruins). Definitely the best.

2. My own photography.

[NickMiddleton]

A further (tentative) suggestion - try Scribus. I did Outpost 19 and Uncounted Worlds Issue 1 using Pages '08, which worked OK, but I want something a little more high end for future issues of UW and other projects (especially in terms of producing PDF's suitable for Lulu's distribution deals) and can't afford InDesign - and Scribus is looking pretty good at the moment.

As for art - clipart is OK, look for some public domain images as well, and ask around here for artists. No art is better than bad art - but serviceable if uninspiring clipart breaking up the text is better than excessively large blocks of text for readability.

Proper indexes are works of art: subtle, complex and flexible tools that allow one to pursue a particular idea or concept through a work with ease. They are also a bitch to construct properly. I'd go for a suitable brief Table of Contents at the front and then something billed as a "detailed table of contents" at the back - something that picks up on all the section headings, tables and diagrams etc but makes no claim to be a true index.

Cheers,

Nick

Edited April 1, 2009 by NickMiddleton

[rleduc]

Thanks to both of you -- I'll be looking into Scribus.

[Agentorange]

Hello All,

Well I have a draft of four out of five chapters of Rubble and Ruin and I am starting to worry about assembling the final monograph. I have a few questions and I would love to hear any advice the folks at this forum might have to offer.

Here they are (in no particular order, and with a certain amount of rambling):

1: font ownership. Chaosium says the authors must own the fonts in their works. I am using Arial and something called “OCR A Extended” both of which shipped on my laptop when I bought it. Anyone know if I can use these fonts? How do I find out?

Almost completely of topic but.....does it say own or have a license to use ? I only ask because if it's own then that means millions of people and thousands of software companies owe me oodles of money. After all if I own the fonts then they've all used them without my permission.

[rleduc]

Me again,

So my current plan is to use my own line art in the interior – it should count as neither good nor bad, and if used judiciously I think it will work fine, but there is this “Robot Parking Only” sign here at my real job that I’m thinking of photograph (plus, I take the train through the ruins of East St. Louis each day and there are some half collapsed buildings that I may try).

Any advice on using photography? What sort of resolution do I need for a small “single column wide” image?

Again, I greatly appreciate all the helpful comments I have been receiving,

Rich

[neorxnawang]

I have gotten better at this over time.

The higher the res, the better is the golden rule for inserting into manuscripts. The real trick will be to size the photo so that it looks good. Use of columns and section breaks so that a picture spreads across the whole page horizontally is what I recommend. I spent a good chunk of last weekend doing exactly that.

[Puck]

anyone know of a good source for inexpensive PA artwork?

I don't know if this is what you had in mind. I slammed these together pretty quickly and I think a little more could be done. Let me know if anything like this would work?