Formatting for Print: The Self-Publisher's Guide, #1

The Self-Publisher’s Guides for Print

Formatting for Print

No-Fail Fonts Blueprints

Free Fonts Blueprints

VAB

Vox Tabulam

Copyright © 2019 R. Patton

All rights reserved.

Contains annotated and edited text from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as published by The MacMillan Company, New York in 1898 (first published in 1865)

ISBN 978-1-948603-16-4

ISBN 978-1-948603-17-1 (ebook)

To the self-publishers searching for the answers to their questions about print

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Making Mac & Cheese

Part 1: An Introduction to Typography

Commonly Used Terms

Classifying Typefaces

Part 2: Book Design Ingredients

Trim Size

Finding Your Font

Free Fonts

Other Fonts

How to Choose Your Font

How to Pair Fonts

Part 3: Setting the Page

Setting Your Margins

Setting the Paragraph Rules

Setting the Styles

Typographical Faults

Part 4: Parts of a Book

Parts of a Page

Parts of the Front Matter

Parts of the Body Matter

Parts of the Back Matter

Parts of a Nonfiction Book

The Colophon: A Very Special Part

Part 5: Putting it All Together

Getting Started

Adjusting the Template

Fixing the Page

Exporting The PDF

Appendix A: CSS for Ebooks

Appendix B: InDesign Export Tagging Styles

Appendix C: InDesign Advanced Template

Appendix D: Advanced Template CSS

Appendix E: Cheat Sheets

Glossary

References & Resources

About This Book

Preface

When I set out to format my first book for print, I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know where to find the answers or the questions to ask for the answers I wanted. Why was it so difficult to find the ideal font or font size to use in a print book? Or margins? Why weren’t there any standards?

I looked for answers. None were in the same place, and they never where you expected to find them. Fortunately, some great tools are available to make finding these answers unnecessary. Unfortunately for me, I’m a bit of a control freak, and those tools take some control away.

I formatted my first book in Word. Nothing is wrong with Word. It’s capable of producing a decent print book, but most of the tools you need are hidden in menus. After my first book, I dusted off an old copy of InDesign and brushed up on my skills.

Through a lot of trial and error, I learned about conventions and best practices. Yet I still feel as though I understand only a fraction of a fraction about interior page layouts. That’s the problem with learning something new. You realize how much you’re clueless about. I am self-taught. I didn’t take a class or go to school for design. Instead, I read every book mentioned, visit every website about book design, and browse every typesetting and typographer community I stumble across. My knowledge is a small tip of a massive iceberg, but it’s more than enough to format a book so the final product looks no different from a traditionally published book.

I shared what I learned in various communities for independent authors, but those guides barely touched the surface. When a friend suggested I publish one of the guides, I brushed the idea aside for all of ten minutes. If I published my formatting for print guide, I could go much deeper than those previous guides.

Formatting For Print was the sapling that emerged from the seed planted by my friend.

A quick note: I mention a lot of programs, foundries, and companies. I do not receive any compensation for these mentions. I refer to them because I use and trust them, but I am not endorsing them. Just because they work for me doesn’t mean they will work for you.

Introduction

Making Mac & Cheese

What does mac & cheese have to do with the interior design and formatting of a print book? Everything. As I wrote this book, moved chapters around, added content, and removed content, I realized Formatting for Print was like a cookbook. A cookbook about a single concept, but a cookbook nonetheless.

Macaroni and cheese is a four-ingredient recipe; pasta, cheese, milk, and butter. As long as you have those four items, you’re good to go. However, you can use fresh pasta, homemade pasta, or pasta from a box. You can use Velveeta (which I’m not sure is a cheese), Gruyère, Parmesan, cheddar, or Gouda. You aren’t restricted to milk; you can use cream or broth. You can even replace the butter with flavored olive oil.

Moreover, who says you have to make your own? You can buy mac & cheese frozen and (almost) ready to eat. Alternatively, you can get it in a box where you add milk and butter. The point is, despite the ingredients being the same, the kind of ingredients you use can change it from a quick and easy meal to a gourmet dish fit for a five-star restaurant. Book design is similar.

Just like you can buy macaroni & cheese frozen and ready to go, you can plug your manuscript into templates, which you can purchase or find for free. There’s also software where you make a few decisions, and it does the rest for you, similar to the boxes of mac & cheese found in so many pantries. These are both excellent options and better than converting a word document with no formatting to a PDF, but you’ll still end up with a book that looks like all the other self-published books out there.

Or you can take the ingredients and make your own.

Have you ever read a book, but couldn’t make it past the first few chapters? The writing wasn’t a problem; you enjoyed the story and the characters. Maybe there was something else to do rather than picking the book back up? Maybe you had a reason for putting the book down? Chances are it’s because of the typesetting. The one thing you don’t notice, or at least shouldn’t, can make a difference to how enjoyable reading a book is. The goal of good typesetting is for the words on the page to be invisible, so the reader focuses on what the words are saying. When that goal isn’t met, the context gets in the way of the content, and the book becomes a chore to read. Too small print, too tight line spacing, or margins too close to the edge of the page can make reading a book go from relaxing to stressful.

Typesetting a book is part math, part psychology, part convention, and a lot of knowing when to throw all that away because it’s not working. Of course, that assumes you know when it’s not working. Software and templates are good at the math and conventions parts. However, they fail at knowing when the typesetting isn’t working and how to fix the problem. A professional designer can tell when the typesetting is off and knows how to fix the problem but also knows when to break all those rules. Good book designers charge as much as they do because typesetting is as much a science as an art, and they are worth every single penny. A good interior designer can cost anywhere from $1000-$2000 for a 250-300-page book. Software costs a lot less, especially the more you use it. A template costs less as long as you have the software to use the template.

Alternatively, you can learn how to be an amateur interior book designer and typesetting a book costs the price of this book and your time. To give you an idea of what my time costs, I charge anywhere from $1.50 to $3.50 per finished page based on the amount of customization involved. Depending on the complexity of the project, I can do 10-25 pages an hour, so my time is worth around $35 an hour.

That might seem like a lot when you take into consideration how many print books you sell. However, I don’t just sell print books; I give them away. I donate books to community fund raisers, give away signed copies, and leave them at the Little Free Libraries. Those print copies are the first impression a reader has of me, and I want to make sure it’s the best. Formatting my book, so it looks indistinguishable from a traditionally published book is a large part of making a great first impression. Readers judge books by their covers, but they also judge books by their interiors. For me, $35 an hour is a good deal.

If you take the plunge and design the layout yourself, you need a few tools. Ideally, you have access to desktop publishing software like InDesign, QuarkXpress, Publisher, or Scribus (an open-source desktop publishing software), but they aren’t a requirement. You can design a book using Word or OpenOffice. A word processor won’t have the detailed customization options, but you’ll still produce good looking print books. Besides, most readers won’t consciously notice the subtle differences between a book designed with a word processor and one designed on a desktop publisher. The desktop publisher might do a better job, but the word processor does a good job. It’s not like using MS Paint instead of Adobe Photoshop.

You’ll want access to a printer for test pages. When it comes time to find the best font for your book, you’ll want to see how the font looks on paper before making the final decision. What you see on screen is not what your reader sees on the page.

I also keep a book or two nearby for reference, along with a ruler and a pad of post-its or paper. There are times when I jot down numbers, and it’s easier to stick them to my screen than remembering where I made the note.

Finally, you’ll need this book.

This book is an introduction to some core concepts part of good book design. It’s like a 101 course in college. You’ll learn the basic concepts and how to use them in your design. Your formatted book will hold its own against a traditionally published book with a professionally designed layout, but it probably won’t win any design awards.

By the end of this book you’ll know:

What information to include in your print book

How to find the best typeface

How to set your book

You’ll also have a base template for all your print books

And an advanced template for InDesign you can use to generate both a PDF for print and an epub

PART ONE

An Introduction to Typography

Before you begin to making macaroni and cheese, you have to understand the tools you’ll be working with. You don’t have to decide what pot to use, but need to understand the differences between a sauce and frying pan.

Book design uses letters instead of pots and pans, but you still need to understand your tools. Specifically the shapes of letters and how they interact with one another to form words, sentences, and paragraphs on the page. In other words, typography.

Typography is the use of text to convey information. A street sign telling a driver when to exit, is typography. A chalkboard inviting someone to try a cup of soup at a cafe is typography. A book full of words telling the reader a story is typography. It’s art and science. It’s form and function. It’s the foundation of good typesetting, which is the key component of good interior design.

Type designers who have created some of the brilliant typefaces you see on the pages of books have spent years refining their art. A good designer will have done 90% of the work for us. It’s that final 10% we need to worry about. But if we can’t identify what’s wrong, we won’t be able to know what adjustments to make. That’s the reason for part one. You not only need to identify what’s wrong, but what’s causing the fault. Once you determine the cause, you can decide how to fix it or if it even needs fixing, You need to understand why a typeface better suited to children’s books might not work well in a literary novel. And to do all that, you need to learn the elements of the characters of a typeface and how they interact with other elements. You need to know the terms commonly used by designers or you might as well be speaking a foreign language.

Chapter One

Commonly Used Terms

Glossaries usually go at the end of a book, and this is an excellent example of breaking from convention when it doesn’t work. To understand the conventions described in later chapters, such as how to choose a font for print, you need to have a grasp of the different elements that combine to make the characters of a typeface. If I placed this section at the end of the book, you’d constantly flip back and forth, and that doesn’t help anyone. This glossary attempts to give you the best and most common definitions for terms relating to type design.

Another break with convention is that these terms aren’t in alphabetical order. Instead, they build upon each other. (Don’t worry, I do have a glossary at the end of the book where the terms are in alphabetical order.) It might not make sense right at the moment, but by the end, you’ll understand why terminal comes before ball terminal.

There is a caveat. Some more commonly used terms are misused. When I define a term with a standard definition, I also include the most accurate definition. It likely won’t make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things though. Most professional designers won’t think less of you for using the word font instead of typeface.

Okay, now that we have all the formalities out of the way, let’s dig into type design, the anatomy of characters, and common terms.

Typeface Terms

Type Foundry: A company, organization, or individual who designs and distributes typefaces.

Typeface: The design or the shape of the letters or characters. Typefaces are identified by name. Baskerville and Sabon are the names of a typeface. Moreover, there can be several versions of a typeface where it’s difficult to see the differences. Other times, the typeface is so recognizable that it can be identified with one eye closed, such as Comic Sans. Then there are the typefaces that have become a part of the world around us, such as Gill Sans

Typestyle: Most typefaces are available in at least three or four styles, Roman (upright), Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic. These are the most common styles and the ones probably most familiar to you.

Font: The standard definition is used interchangeably with typeface, but that isn’t correct. A font is one style of one typeface. Baskerville Bold is a different font from Baskerville Roman. If you’ve ever bought a font, the description might say it included three fonts. What that means is the typeface comes with three font files. While the distinction is important to designers and typographers, it usually isn’t all that important to us.

Font Family: A combination of all the fonts, typestyles, and typefaces in one collection. Some families are massive with a variety of styles, such as a serif and script typeface designed to work together. Others might only have the three or four most common (Roman, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic). A benefit of using a typeface with a large family is having a book page with a consistent look and feel and. You also won’t have to make minor adjustments or have to consider pairing fonts.

Character: Can be a letter, ligature, punctuation, number, or even a symbol. These are the basic components that make up a typeface.

Ornament: Any decorative character available in a font. Can include dingbats and flowers. When part of a font, it is designed to work with that font. There are also typefaces that are strictly ornaments without any letters or numbers.

Structure: The basic form of a character that identifies it as that character. For instance, we know that an A is not an H because of the two angled lines meeting at the top of the letter. Note: A and H share the same number of strokes. The only difference is the angle of the vertical strokes. That is structure.

Figures: Numbers or numerals.

Lining Figures: Numbers that have the same height, so they align at the baseline.

Old Style Figures: Numbers that have different heights and widths. They behave more like lowercase letters. Fiction tends to use old style figures. Books where numbers play a significant role tend to use lining figures.

Pica: An absolute unit of measurement used in typography. 6 picas = 1 inch (approximately).

Point: An absolute unit of measurement used in typography. 12 points = 1 pica and 72 points = 1 inch.

Bounding Box: The imaginary box in which a character fits. The height of the box is the point size, the width is variable (except for monospaced faces). The width is derived from the width of the character plus the side bearings or space built into the character by the designer.

Point Size: A measurement, in points, of a typeface at a set size. The measurement doesn’t measure the actual character, but instead the height of the bounding box in which the character is designed.

Em: A standard width measurement based on