Teeny little columns driving me out of my mind
Last night C woke me up and I couldn’t get back to sleep so I worked on my SoFoBoMo book. I’m done with most of the photography, so now I’m working on the text pages. There is rather a lot more text in this book. At least, that’s the current plan, I may cut pages to meet deadline, or I might say screw the deadline, I’m doing this book right; I’m on the fence and could go either way.
Blurb’s text pages are… meh. I’m not terribly happy with their restrictive layout choices. I’m going with teeny little columns (teeny because I want to set the book at 12 pt. type), three of them across the page, with photos interspersed as needed.
Having recently read a graphic design text book, I decided to try justifying the text, hyphenating as needed to keep the spaces between words from getting out of hand. This did not go as planned.
The columns are too small! Frequently I’d have to make word/sentence changes, and that combined with the almost constant hyphenation caused all my copy to read like… bad newspaper-ese. Looking at columns of text in a real newspaper today I noticed that the columns in the newspaper aren’t nearly as narrow as the Blurb book. Yeah, it looks nice if you hold it away from your face and squint, but what good is it looking good if it doesn’t read good?
So screw the pretentious graphic design, I’m running my copy ragged right, damn the torpedos, full speed ahead.
Oh, one more thing, having to layout the book while writing for the first time is… time consuming. I spent 3-4 hours writing, editing, and laying out two pages. If I take an honest estimate of how many 3-4 hour blocks of free time I’m going to have in my immediate future, at this rate I’ll finish the book in October.
June 2nd, 2009 at 6:35 pm
you must have missed the spot in the book that said justified text in narrow columns is a bad idea.
June 2nd, 2009 at 10:33 pm
It might be your font size choice that’s causing your problems – 12pt looks good on a screen but is often too big when on a printed page – 10pt is quite common there. You may do better left justifying the text, too.
June 3rd, 2009 at 9:58 am
My book had 12pt text, but that was just for captions. I compared that with the text size in other books and 10pt seems about right. 12pt was way bigger than the text in the books I compared it to. I’m guessing the text size in a newspaper is smaller than 12pt too. I’m not sure if Blurb has the option to choose your font, but I know some fonts are much wider than others. I used to use certain fonts to make college papers longer without actually writing more.