Date: 2015-10-23
To: Book Update
Miles today: 0.0

The proof of the book arrived. It was pretty cool to see it! Our church pastor was over for lunch, and just as Robb was leaving the UPS guy drove up, so I got to show Robb the book, too. I used my McAfee Knob picture for the cover of the book and the one of Linda and me kissing on the top of Katahdin for the back - came out better than I thought it would!The pictures inside are OK, but could be better. Linda and I decided I should try to upgrade their quality. Hope to have another proof copy about the end of next week. This is turning into a MUCH more laborious process than I thought it would be, but hey, I've got the time and I'm learning new stuff! :-)For those of you who might be interested in printing a book, here's what happened:I copied all my journal entries from the Trail Journals pages into a Word 2010 document. This included the pictures from the web pages. I did all this to have a digital copy of my journal as well as being able to print a hard copy. I then went through the document and got rid of all the tables by dragging all the pictures and text into the main document. I then formatted all the text and pictures to look nice on standard size (8.5"x11") pages in a two column format. I sized each of the pictures to fit into one column.I knew the pictures were of reduced quality since Trail Journals compresses them before putting them on the web site. I figured if I didn't like them I'd go back and substitute the original picture files.It came to 150 pages, which I had Staples print in black and white in a spiral binder for about $20. I used that to proof it and get a feel for the layout. Linda and I decided that although the size of the pictures that fit into a column were good, I should go for a smaller overall format for the book. I ended up deciding on 7"x9" with two columns. At this size, however, if I sized the pictures to fit into a column, they would be too small. So I put the pictures (over 320) with their titles into text boxes that could overlap into the adjoining column, with the journal text flowing around them. The pain of this is that when I insert or change the position of a text box in Word, it often causes other text boxes to jump around. Anyway, I finally figured it out.I also decided to replace the picture files with the originals as I went along. After about 25 pages, Word started behaving funny - pausing for long times and then closing and reopening. During one of these processes I canceled the process but had to close Word to get out of some loop. When I tried to open it, Word said the document file size was too large! I discovered that Word has a file size limit - 521GB. I had been inserting a bunch of 2 to 6 MB files, and Word also saves all the cropping and resizing info. (I guess the long pauses were Word trying to compress the document into the allowed file size each time after I inserted a new picture.) I tried several options getting my work back to no avail. A few days of work down the drain... but I learned a lot! :-)I played around using Photoshop to compress my pictures to around 1MB or less, figuring that I could insert 320 and stay under the total file size limit. Since we were traveling, I used Staples to print out a couple of pages to compare the print quality of the different compressions. I decided there wasn't that much difference and to go ahead with the web site pictures and see if they were good enough when I got a proof copy of the book. So I started over putting it into a 7x9 format using the web site pictures. That's what I sent to Create Space.Create Space gave me a message that the dpi of my photos was less than the 200 dpi they recommend as a minimum, with 300 dpi being the recommended size. Nearly all mine were between about 72 and 170. Researching my problems, I discovered that Word is not a particularly good program for making a book with pictures. Even when I insert high quality pictures, Word will compress them. There are some defaults I can change which might override the compression, but apparently when I use Word to save the document as a pdf, it compresses the pictures. The Create Space forums mentioned Adobe's InDesign program as a good one for what I was trying to do. Problem is, it's expensive and I'd have to learn how to use it. Turns out I have a copy of version 2 (they're now on version 7) that I got as part of an educational package I bought when I was at Purdue 10 years ago in order to get Photoshop and Premier. I had never used it.The forums and other sites taught me that I should resize my pictures using a program such as Photoshop BEFORE I insert them into my document. I also learned how to make them 300 DPI using Photoshop - I hadn't been doing that when I did my testing mentioned above. I resized my Springer Mountain picture and compared it to the one from the web site using my home printer and did notice a difference.I'm now in the process of learning InDesign and how to transfer all my work into it - not as straightforward as I'd hoped! I'm also resizing all my original photo files using Photoshop. The nice thing is that I've already done the hard work of figuring out how I want to crop and place the pictures in the document, so I already know what dimensions I want them each to be (it varies) ahead of time when I use Photoshop.I started out a little begrudging the fact I wasn't finished and had all this work yet to do. But I've actually enjoyed learning something new! I'm a big proponent of life-long learning! :-)It might well be that I could use Word with the properly resized pictures (and the defaults set to not compress them) and then convert to pdf using a different program that doesn't compress the picture files. However, since I've got InDesign and from what I've read it's the better way to go, I'll continue down this route.Hope to finish this weekend and submit it to Create Space. Then I'll order another proof copy.