On Thu, 2006-07-13 at 22:26 -0400, John R. Culleton wrote:
As it happens I have good contacts in the publishing industry (see my sig block.) If you like I can shop around for a printer. Usually people go to Asia for color printing at a reasonable price. But that means committing to a run of around 2,000 copies.
I did see the sig block!
I also have my own imprint and can act as a publisher. But no publisher will do much about marketing your book. Your audience is right here on this mailing list. I am sure most on the list would want to buy the book if the price can be brought down. Let me see what I can come up with. I am sure I can beat $0.15/page. That is a copy shop price.
I would appreciate your checking.
I downloaded the pdf and am trying to print it out. But even on my black and white laser printer it is slow going. Apparently the illustrations are high density and are clogging up the process.
I am sure many of the illustrations could be optimized for size, something I have not done. I just discovered that the largest bitmap could be cut to 1/3 its original size by changing it from RGB to gray scale (it should have been gray scale from the beginning). Fop uses Batik to render the SVG's (see below). I have not idea what the size of the illustrations it produces are. A few of the SVG's are quite large (especially in the Tracing section) and might be reduced in size by applying the Simplify command without too much loss in resolution. If you notice any particular pages that are slow to print I can try to improve graphics on those pages.
How did you prepare the pdf exactly? I note that there are xml files involved. What steps, using what software, were involved in your authoring process?
I am using the svn version of Apache's fop ( http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/ ) which uses xsltproc for the first past. In the past I've tried using fop with xalan for the first past. The SVG's are converted by fop using Batik.
Some of the problems I see are:
1. Page headers have their text stacked vertically so that they overlap the main body text. That is why headers are turned off.
2. Using an <indexterm> tag inserts a bit of extra space. This may be due to the space I leave around the tag.
3. The arrows in the menu keyboard shortcuts are replaced by '#'. Probably a font problem.
4. The majority of footnotes are not printed and when they are printed they some times overlap the main body.
Tav