Fwd: FW: Your Xlibris Submission

[Sebastian Rahtz]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2002 at 01:30:10PM -0400, John Unsworth wrote:
> >> 1.  Your PDF documents were not saved exactly to the specifications that 
> >I
> >> sent to David Seaman.  We were able to work with it, but we had to reduce
> >> the size.  Whereas the PDF that you sent was saved at 8 1/2 by 11 inches,
> >> our pages are 8 1/2 by 5 1/2 inches.  See the attached file to see how
> >> this will affect the layout.  The text will appear a bit small, but when
> >> we printed it, it was readable.

um, this is simply laughable. a book of 600 pages @ 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 
would be unuseable.

hrinking the page to fit seems a bad idea. I find the
size OK as is, any smaller would be no fun at. 

> >> have to have a marker on each right hand page, lower left-hand corner
> >> indicating the code of the book.  This is to help our printers when they
> >> bind the books, a factor that comes up with On-demand printing.  The 

ah jeez, what is this bunch of amateurs?

> >codes
> >> we need placed are 15164-UNSW and 15165-UNSW.  The former for part one,
> >> the latter for Part two.

However, I can do that if I have to, quite easily

Conclusion: I don't like the way this is smelling. If we are working
to a paper size of 8 1/2 x 5 1/2, I would want to consider a 
fairly serious redesign, and that means:

 - a fair amount of effort
 - checking all the page breaks etc again
 - (worst) checking all the example texts, which
   are carefully line-broken by hand

equally, I don't like the Omnipress solution very much,
as it puts a hideous burden on our finances and on someone
to store and post books, and collect money.

I really don't know what to do. I am half-inclined to
print 200 copies for our members and start negotiations with a
real publisher.

John, can you put their shrunken PDF on a web server somewhere?

-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      OUCS Information Manager
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431