CreativePro Forum

Return to Member Forum

• Author
  Posts
• • May 8, 2011 at 7:52 am #59527
    Julia Thorne

    Member

    Hi, I'm pretty new to InDesign; in fact, I've taught myself using DVDs and online resources as I've been asked by an academic research society to learn up some desktop publishing as they are looking to reduce the costs of using a professional typesetting company, so hopefully I'll be looking at doing some freelance typsetting an academic journal, a bi-annual magazine and some academic books.

    I have a couple of questions, though, about typesetting longer pieces:

    1. Creating the book covers – I read somewhere (I think it was an about.com article) that in order to create a book cover with the correctly sized spine, I need to find out the thickness of the paper the printers will be using, and multiply that by the number of pages in the book. Is this right?

    2. If I'm provided with a very long Word document (authors are instructed to submit all work in Word format, conforming to a strict house style…makes life a little easier, I guess!), and I want to work with a book rather than one long document, would it be more efficient to place each chapter into a separate file, or to auto-place the whole document into one ID document, then split that document up?

    Thanks for reading!

    Julia

  • May 9, 2011 at 2:31 am #59533
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    If the book is A4 then the cover is A4+Spine+A4 = so that would be 210mm+Spine+210mm = 420m+spine

    The thickness of the paper is not the only contributing factor! What about the glue! Is the book threadsewn? If so then you need to add about 1mm extra for the glue and an additional 1mm if it's threadsewn!

    YOUR printers will be able to give you the accurate spine width based on the paper used. They'll actually use blank pages, fold it, glue it, (threadsew if needed) and measure the width of the spine for you. They do it all the time it's what they're there for :) Don't be afraid to ask your printers questions! It's imperative they are involved.

    In regards to working on the file.

    I find it efficient to take all the book into one document, that way I can keep the styles and other things pretty neat.

    Depending on the project, and how many chapters, and if I have a lot of running heads/chapter numbers or other things, I will split the document up into Chapters AFTER I've finished applying all the styles and treating the text.

    It's much easier to find all those little errors, like hyphens instead of endashes, and double spaces etc. This is what I like to call the RAW file where I'm just parsing it through lots of find and changes to speed up the process.

    One book I do has 2 running heads per page, includes the chapter number in the title aswell. It was necessary to break this book up into separate chapters and work from the book file. And it was over 3000 pages. So it was a must.

    It all depends on the content really.

  • May 12, 2011 at 4:40 am #59576
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I set up books for a publisher (helion.co.uk) all the time. If your authors submit their Word documents following your company's strict format/guidelines, then why not set each chapter as a separate file. When you want to run Find/Change you just open all the documents and specify All Documents in the Find/Change box.

    When you've set up the chapters, set up a new Book file. Add the chapters in the right order. Synchronise the styles by clicking in the little box to the left of the chapter name in the Book list and then synchronise by going to the flyout menu.

    As for covers, it's so much easier recently because you can set up 3 pages (for a paperback, 5 for a dustcover) as a spread and each page can be a different size (there's a page tool in the tools bar and you can set individual page sizes/margins there). The publisher I work for likes to have the covers 6 months in advance, so the spine width always changes. Again, it's easy to change the width with the Page Tool — and you can also move pages with this tool to accommodate the changed spine width.

    That's just my opinion, of course. There are always a squillion ways of doing the same thing!!

  • May 12, 2011 at 5:28 am #59577
    Julia Thorne

    Member

    Thanks for the advice! I guess it'll be a guess of a bit of trial and error to find out what works for me best, but it's great to have a couple of starting points now though :)

  • May 16, 2011 at 6:13 am #59617
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    Thank you for the inspiration for the main InDesign topic in our recent podcast!

    https://creativepro.com/ind…..st-149.php

    We also talk about useful scripts for book cover layout design, check it out.

    AM

  • May 16, 2011 at 6:16 am #59618
    Julia Thorne

    Member

    Oooh, fantastic! I'll have a listen when I get home from work later :)

• Author
  Posts