[lore] Draft of the next edition

[David Basden]

On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 02:57:36PM +0800, Grahame Bowland wrote:
> >        - If you're using Microsoft Publisher, please don't, otherwise,
> >        it's easy to get a few of the pages to look better
> 
> I'm actually using Apple's Pages, which seems quite sensible. However,
> I have very little experience using it, having only bought it
> yesterday.

Cool. Is it any good? My main point was that Publisher doesn't actually let you have
very much control. Less than Word even *fear*.

> >        - Avoid font-crime. Too many fonts on the same page is pretty
> >        ugly. Magazines ignore this because magazines have pictures of
> >        hot girls/guys to distract from any other layout pain that might
> >        exist. We need either soft-core pr0n, or fonts that don't look
> >        like ComicSans.
> 
> Pretty much every single page is limited to one font for body text,
> one font for the header, and one font for code excerpts. Not sure
> where the crime is in that.

Mainly anything that looks like ComicSans, but that's really my own
personal nightmare rather than anyone elses ;)

> I was actually going to go with A4 stapled for the format of this one.
> It seems to have been the past format of Lore, and it's supposed to be
> technical. B5 or A5 would both suck quite a bit to fit code into.

Cool; Previous posts just suggested that it might be [AB]5, and like you
said, its pretty hard to make it not suck...

> >        - For thick dotted lines as rules, see above comments re: ms
> >        publisher and pr0n.
> 
> There's only one of those and it's on the Dr. Murphy page.. does it
> cause you that much pain? :P

Damn right ;) Again, probably my own personal nightmare from seeing too
much MS Publisher output, and you'll see what it looks like at the end
anyhow.

> >        - Your use of text wrapping around images, and background images
> >        is great. If it's going to be printed or photocopied make sure
> >        the shade of background images is around 20% of black, and that
> >        you use a screen rather than relying on laser printer dithering
> >        for all images to avoid images looking almost all black, almost
> >        all white, or just crap. As Davyd mentioned, make sure that the
> >        resolution is enough; ~150-200dpi for non-lineart, and higher
> >        for lineart.
> Well, I'll print it and see how it looks.

The stuff above really doesn't apply unless you are doing offset
printing or using a *really* crappy photocopier. Considering laser
prints are the same cost as photocopying, I doubt it will come up. This
is what I get by posting before coffee.


.. D