Gordon Woolf's Blog

'Large print' is not just type set larger

An interesting suggestion I saw on a publisher forum a while ago was to produce a large print edition and to just reduce the pages of this to make the standard edition. The logic was that some of the readers for which the book was intended were sufferers of diabetes, which often brings sight problems.

Unfortunately the internationally researched standards for large print books, are not just an enlarged form of normal typesetting. And there is a big difference in producing books for those who are substantially sight impaired, and books for those of us who may have a slight deterioration in sight within the normal ranges of variation with age.

A chapter in the current edition of Type & Layout (the book by Colin Wheildon republished by The Worsley Press) -- although this is a chapter in the additional material by Geoffrey Heard -- does describe how preparing a book for the non-fluent reader is different to preparing a book for a fluent reader who may have minor sight problems, or no problems at all.

Just one quick example: although Wheildon's research showed that for reasonably fluent readers, justified serif type is by far the most readable, that is not true for someone who is less fluent, either through education or sight.

The chapter also includes information on the alternative of "Clear Type", a standard developed by the Royal National Institute for the Blind, with standards which, while being acceptable to a wide range of those with site problems, is more acceptable to others. While tending towards sans faces it does accept fonts with a good serif definition such as Bookman.

I would therefore warn against producing a smaller version of a large type, or even "Clear Type" book as a normal edition.

If the text of a book is correctly tagged in its preparation it would be a very simple matter to run it through with alternative layout specifications. I'd estimate an hour or two in a program such as InDesign, maybe even less in an entirely tag based layout program such as TeX.

There will need to be an entire new round of research into legibility on ebook readers.

Software that refuses to die

How many software programs from 1994 are you still using?

When I upgraded to Windows 7 and chose the 64-bit version, I expected to say goodbye to some of the pieces of software that I've used for many years.

But my barcode creation software, UPCTools, bought in 1994, refuses to die...it just keeps on working, now with its fifth operating system since it first ran in Windows 95 (or was it Windows 3.1?).

Admittedly it now runs in XP Mode, but I can select it from the Start menu of Windows 7, and then just use the UPC Tools menu item "copy" to copy the result in to InDesign (which was no more than a twinkle in the eye of some of the software people at Aldus when this software was written by Jerry Whiting at Azalea Software). The barcode fonts, which were in Type 1 Postscript format, installed in the Windows 7 font folder by just dragging them in en masse. When viewed now within InDesign those fonts show up as just one font with eight styles (to suit three inkspread requirements plus half height versions. 

Yes that is Windows 7 and the software running does say Copyright 1994. Some software was written with the future in mind!

Incidentally, to get software that runs in the XP virtual environment to show up in the Start menu of Windows 7 you have to put a shortcut in the "All Users" subfolder of the Start menu in XP and then reboot your PC. It took me a while to work that one out.

Of course I'm not suggesting you should buy the 1994 version of UPCTools but if you are looking for barcode software that will work in to the next decade, You'll find lots of info about barcodes in general at http://www.azalea.com/FAQ/

Overall, I'm happy with the decision to upgrade and the computer with its extra memory is performing well -- not a BSOD since the upgrade, though I was previously thinking it had to be replaced.

Give your Printing Problems the Binary Chop!

The Binary Chop isn't a new form of karate. It reverses the power of the computer by calculating using two digits, the equivalent of on and off, just as the computer does.

There are many problems with printing — in fact as a consultant, I have more calls about printing problems than any other aspect of desktop publishing — but the most common problem can easily be solved using the Binary Chop.

This problem is that a file just refuses to print.

Firstly, check that a known good file will still print. If it does, then it is almost certain that the problem is with the non-printing file, and not with your printer or network. You could also try creating a PDF of the file. And, if that works, try printing from the PDF.

Here are a series of other steps to take:

1. Make a copy of the file under a new name and check whether this prints (sometimes the process of re-ordering and compression in file size which occurs from a Save as… command will solve the problem).
2. If you are on a network, try printing the file from the computer to which the printer is attached (which may also enable you to check whether the printer begins to accept information and whether this continues for some time before the printer returns to Idle mode. You can also check this on networks by following the progress of the job from your computer using the network software).
3. Using the copy of the file, try printing without graphics by using the Omit graphics selection under print Options if this exists. If the file prints then selectively delete and restore graphics files until you isolate the one causing the problem.
4. If the file has multiple pages, send half the pages, then the other half. This is the first application of the Binary Chop; by halving the non-printing pages each time, until you can isolate, hopefully, a single non-printing page. If you have more than one non-printing page, look for typefaces or graphics which they have in common.
5. Take one non printing page and cut and paste half the objects to a new file. Try both halves. If one half prints, you know your problem is almost certainly in the other half. Either way, continue halving the number of objects until you isolate a single object which will not print. See below for a solution if both halves print but not the whole.
6. If everything else prints, go back to the original page, make another copy, delete just the offending item, and, hopefully, your page will print.
7. Replace the offending object, which may be a graphic or a piece of type.

What font should I use?

Someone asked the other day: "What font should I use to be sure that it will be easy to read?" There has been one piece of publicly available research carried out in the English-speaking world into what fonts and styling in text makes it easiest to understand the content. This was by Colin Wheildon in Sydney in the 1980s and was republished three years ago as Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes. It was carried out by printing sample articles of the kind intended for magazine or newspaper use and measuring the comprehension by asking questions to show whether the participants understood the content. There's a downloadable extract of the book at http://worsleypress.com/type/ and the book is available from Amazon as well as elsewhere. A couple of comments: This is based on whether the font choice and styling actually work, not whether they look good, and it is a book not only unpopular but campaigned against by some graphic artists. It also applies only to English speaking countries -- the very limited tests in European countries infer that sans may do relatively better than serif in that region. It was also mainly conducted with narrow columns -- newspaper and magazine style rather than books. I'd also better declare my interest -- I played a role in returning the book to print though I no longer have any ownership in the business which does publish it. It is sad that this is the only work which is based on research rather than opinion. Some work has been done privately on behalf of major publishing groups and associations but is not publicly available.