Progress on fannish works

[luzula]

1) My Yuletide fic is POSTED! \o/ Also I have a treat which is finished, except that it needs a title.

2) My poly fic is at 53K. Bless garonne for all her feedback on it! ♥ I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up at around 100K...

3) I've got two long podfic/audiobook projects which will soon be ready to post.

4) I'm going to attempt bookbinding, because I want my own longfics in my bookcase! : D
Step 1: Write a book. Yes, I did that.
Step 2: Do a nice layout. I'm almost done with this, here is what I've got so far. Being a mathematician, of course I'm doing it in LaTeX. *g* If you have thoughts on what would make it better, please share (those A4 pages will be mapped onto A5 when I rearrange them into signatures).
Step 3: Buy tools and materials. Have not done this yet, but it looks like I will have to order from the UK or Germany--I guess the Swedish market is too small for there to exist shops for bookbinding supplies.

Comments

[nyctanthes]

Oh, I read about bookbinding fics a few months back on Tumblr, and it sounded very cool. That's awesome you're doing it.

[luzula]

It seems to be a trend! I'm not in contact with anyone else who does it, but I did find a manual by a Tumblr fan. And was inspired by a fannish friend who got a bound fic as a gift.

[garonne]

So cool. I love the cover with the white rose (and the dedication! <3) Also nice to see all the Part Titles in one place to appreciate them properly. And historical notes!

I have been reading ebooks for so many years now that I forgot about stuff like left and right margins, and the first letter of each chapter being bigger... Everything is so much prettier when it's properly typeset.

I used to be a big fan of LaTeX but I've since switched to markdown+mathjax (The syntax is much lighter, but you wouldn't be able to handle stuff like left and right margins, I guess.)

I noticed that you left out that thing books sometimes do of having the title or part title at the top of each page. (My eye was drawn to that straight away because those top-of-page titles have caused me lots of problems when trying to get scans of Broster's novels automatically transcribed :D )

Also, I actually only learnt the word "signatures" about a week ago, so I am chuffed to now meet it in the wild, so to speak g

Very much looking forward to seeing a photo of the finished book! Are you planning a hardback cover?

[luzula]

Glad you like it! : D

The margins are automatic for the LaTeX book class, but I've tweaked some other things (I guess you can tell I've got a thing for smallcaps, heh).

I noticed that you left out that thing books sometimes do of having the title or part title at the top of each page.

Do you think I should have them? Haven't decided yet...

Yes, I want a hardback cover with a cloth covering! Not sure how/if I should put the title on the cover, though! Would be nice with those stamped, slightly sunk-in gold letters that my first edition FotH has, but I don't know how I'd do that. : ( Probably that's too advanced. Maybe I could just cut a template from paper and then paint with gold paint.

[garonne]

I had never paid much attention to this question before, but of curiosity I just went through all the novels on my bookshelves and around one-third of them have book title and/or part titles and/or chapter titles at the head of each page, and there doesn't seem to be any correlation with genre, decade or country of publication. I even have two books by the same author from the same publishing imprint, one published in 1961 and the other in 1963, and one has headers and the other doesn't. Very strange!

I guess I like them because I associate them with "real books" as opposed to ebooks :D

Stamped gold letters would be so cool! But yeah, also pretty difficult to do, I imagine.

[luzula]

Now I'm leaning towards having the headers, just because my first edition of FotH does have headers with the part titles. I also have an edition that has the whole trilogy in one, but that one very stupidly just has "The Jacobite Trilogy" in the header on all pages! That would seem to defeat the purpose, which must be to make it easy at a quick glance to see where you are in the book...

[jesse_the_k]

Yes! -- same header on all pages is less work, of course. Dictionary headers/footers are the other extreme. They include guide words listing the first and last word on each page. Bet there's a package for that in LaTeX too!

Do mathematicians submit their papers in LaTeX?

Back in 1989, I briefly consulted with someone who wrote the code that transformed the OED from print to an electronic database. I grew up with the Compact edition, which was microfiche size but printed and came with a magnifying glass.

[luzula]

Do mathematicians submit their papers in LaTeX?

Oh, forgot to reply! Yes, we do. And that sounds very cool about the OED.

Page numbering mysteries

[jesse_the_k]

English speaking page numbering is different. The Title page begins with lowercase Roman numeral I, but that isn't printed on the page. The other side of the title usually has the copyright, permissions, maybe a colophon. If there's a table of contents, that continues counting in lowercase Roman numerals. Blank pages increment the page numbers, but you never print a page number on a blank page.

So the last page of the table of contents is "iv". Now the numbering restarts: the first page is numbered 1.

Lovely rose!

Re: Page numbering mysteries

[regshoe]

Oh, that's how that works! I was vaguely aware that in most books the text starts on page 3, but I had no idea about the actual system underlying it–fascinating stuff.

Re: Page numbering mysteries

[jesse_the_k]

...and if the book is printed in any quantity, each sheet (one piece through the press) holds 4 or 8 or even 24 pages, imposed so that once folded, trimmed and sewn together, they're in the right order.

Which was a manual skill in the Olden Days, and now there's software that does it almost automagically

I'm so stoked to find an application for the arcane knowledge I gained back in the 1980s!

Re: Page numbering mysteries

[luzula]

There's a LaTeX package called pdfpages that does the rearranging into signatures for me. : )

Re: Page numbering mysteries

[jesse_the_k]

Of course there is. It's a geometric problem, after all.

Re: Page numbering mysteries

[luzula]

Oh, bless you! That is very helpful. : )

I had to look up "colophon", though.

Re: Page numbering mysteries

[jesse_the_k]

Glad to help! Forgot the lovely jargon: the Roman-numeral pages are your “front matter.” The stuff after the text continues with Arabic numbers, but is “back matter,” such as index, endnotes, acknowledgements (sometime they’re up front), and maybe colophon.

Re: Page numbering mysteries

[luzula]

The page numbering was in fact extremely easy to fix, because of course LaTeX has commands for \frontmatter and \mainmatter. : )

Re: Page numbering mysteries

[jesse_the_k]

I bet LaTeX was the first spell-checker too. I wish we could turn it loose on cleaning the bathroom.

[china_shop]

Congrats on your Yuletide fic and all your other creative endeavours! Woohoo! \o/

[luzula]

Thanks! : )

[regshoe]

Yay for Yuletide fic :D

That book layout is gorgeous. I love the white rose emblem, and you've got the parts/chapters formatting that AO3 couldn't really accommodate all set out nicely! It'll be lovely to see the finished book.

[luzula]

Thanks! I'll tweak it some more (certainly the page numbers!) but it is very satisfying to make it look nice. : )

[starshipfox]

Turning your fic into a book sounds like a wonderful idea! I've always been interesting in book-binding though I have done very little myself: I'd be really interested to hear how it goes for you! I know there are some online classes you can do with a teacher to get the basic skills -- my uncle did one of those this year, and sent me a very nice wee journal he had bound.

LaTeX makes such beautiful layouts!

[luzula]

I can hopefully make do with a written tutorial that I found, along with Youtube videos--but I'm not expecting my first effort to be perfect. : ) I'll definitely post again about the process!