As the saying goes, life has its ups and downs. This week my daughter tested positive for Covid. She’s doing okay, mostly just congested. She had one day she felt terrible, with a horrendous headache, but that was the second day of symptoms and has eased off considerably. Now my husband and I are waiting to see if we get it from her.
So that’s the down.
The up is that the genealogy book I am working on is nearing completion! Remember how I had thought I would need to cut a whole lot of pages to fit it into an affordable price range? The text of this book was clocking in at a whopping 290 pages, while the earlier book I did was only 180. Therefore, I spent a few days trying to cut it down, despairing of ever getting close.
Then I had a bright idea. I decided to look at the final PDF of the first book, to see what the final page count was after I added all the photos, trees, and title pages. I almost fainted, because it was 500 pages! I immediately knew that even with all the inserts added to the 290 pages of text, this book would not be 500 pages. Which meant I did not have to try to cut any text out!
What a relief!
I will finish compiling the PDF tomorrow, then I need to upload that to the printer so I can get a cover template for the book. The final large project will be designing the cover once I have the template. I already know what I would like to do for the cover, so it will just be a matter of getting it done. Then I can send it off to be printed!
Almost there.
How’s your January going?
Not Quite There—CoronaLife Day 684
I had thought that I would be done with the genealogy book I am working on today. Yesterday I got the cover template from the publisher, and finished the cover. I uploaded it today. I had already uploaded the interior content. So all that remained was to run the final checks.
My files failed the final check.
I had uploaded regular PDF files. Apparently, these files did not have the correct color profiles and did not have all the fonts embedded. There was also a warning that one or more of the images was not 300 ppi.
The program told me to convert my file to a PDF-X to solve most of the problems. I had actually expected this, as this was the format needed for my last book with them. I had wanted to try a regular PDF, though, because I had a huge problem when I converted to PDF-X last time.
The conversion added errors to the text—either smashing words together by removing the space between, or adding excess spaces. I don’t mean just a few times, either—the PDF-X was littered with them. I cleaned it up as best I could, but I found even more once I got the printed proof.
You can understand my reluctance to convert it this time.
But there was no alternative, so I converted the PDF to PDF-X. Even though I already paid for a proofread, I am now in process of combing though the new file and cleaning up the text errors the conversion has inserted. Perhaps because I did the conversion differently this time, there are not nearly as many mistakes. Most of them are words smashed together, which is much easier to see than extra spaces.
So I am going to spend at least one more day going over the text to fix mistakes I didn’t make, on a text I have already had proofread. I’m not terribly happy about it, but it must be done, so I might as well buckle down and do it.
The conversion will not help the image under 300 ppi issue, but I am baffled as to which image(s) it might be. I knew from the start that 300 ppi was the standard, so I created everything at that resolution. I am going to re-export the cover as JPEG rather than a PDF, since I can be certain of the JPEG resolution. I am hoping that the wonky image is in the cover, and that this will solve the issue. Otherwise, I will be spending another day combing through the 69 pages of images inserted in the book to try and find the culprit.
Hopefully by the end of the weekend, this will be uploaded and in the queue to be printed!