Sep 9, 2008
Motivation comes up short
BY DERRICK SOBODASH
ately, I’ve been finding it impossibly difficult to sit down and write anything. First there was the buzz of the Beijing Olympics, then getting Lulu her visa to the US, then the ceremonial changing of the employee at work and now we’re into Paralympics reporting.
Sometimes things just don’t slow down.
I should have more to write about. I should have lots to say. Why yesterday, there was the perfectly funny story of how the chain on my bicycle snapped while biking along the highway, causing my foot to shoot down and my sandal to go flying through the air into the left lane. I had to backtrack, wait for the light to change, then keep up with the people coming off their right turns to move into the left lane, lean to the left, stick out my leg and hook the sandals with my toe.
That three minutes would have made a great short story — if I had the energy to write it.
After a month of the Olympics and two months since our paper has covered real news, I’m breaking. I just told my boss that I will need the first two weeks of October off for our trip to the US. I hope it gives both of us a chance to rest and recharge. There are a lot of people I haven’t seen since 2005 or earlier, and even more people my girlfriend has never seen at all.
When I return in October, I plan to open a new section of this Web site. In order to improve my skills with QuarkXpress and gain experience in book design, I will start designing typeset digital editions of public domain books. There are a few bugs to work out with the process since I’m still learning. I have already set one short book, and the second will be the first volume of the 1001 Nights — I have always wanted to finish its stories, and it seems an appropriate choice for the month of Ramadan.
Details will follow, but my current plan is to offer a sponsorship program wherein a sponsor can donate money to have a book of his choice typeset, after which it will be released for free to everyone. I will try to flesh out the plan and have more details available in a later post.
Oh, so Lulu’s the name of your girlfriend? Never knew. Also, what are the Paralympics?
The Paralympics are the Olympics for disabled people. It’s where there are events like wheelchair fencing. Anyone missing a limb or paralyzed is eligible to compete.
Many of the athletes are former Olympians who were badly damaged in various accidents. Our paper covered a lot of back story on some of the athletes, like the Hungarian fencer who was paralyzed from the waist down while in Germany, or the South African runner who has no legs and got rejected for participation in the Olympics by the IOC because they said his artificial legs “gave him a performance advantage.”
The typesetting project sounds awesome! I’ll start thinking about some options…
How about a favourite from my high school years, The Hobbit?
With the Olympics having been held in China recently, I can see why that’d be an interesting story. Neat. I like that.
Alejandro: If I’m not mistaken, The Hobbit as well as the rest of the Lord of the Rings books is still under copyright. I can only legally typeset books which are in the public domain.
Thanks for the voice of support. A lot of people don’t seem to think it’s better to just open a .TXT file in Notepad.exe and pick a font from the drop-down. However, that’s hardly an easy reading experience and is the kind of thing bound to cause eye strain.
I want to make professionally typeset versions of these books so they will be easier and more enjoyable to read on anything which supports PDFs or quality printing — basically anything since the C64. However, if you want to read ebooks on a C64 or an Apple ][ terminal, then TXT files is probably the way to go.
I wish I could comment on the typesetting idea, but I’m not quite sure what it looks like. Isn’t it just typing manuscripts? I’ll look forward to your upcoming work as an example.
Senka: There’s a lot that goes into it visually. You have to make choices regarding which words to hyphenate, how often to hyphenate, the least words that should be present on a line, how to handle cleaning up orphaned lines (when a line ends or begins with the final line of another paragraph), how to design the font, how much space to have between letters, between lines, what ligatures may enhance the reading experience and how to make it attractive.
It’s more than what you do in a word processor. Compare the lettering in a nice-looking book to an MS Word print-out for class.
I do not contest for a second that MS Word does a fantastic job at what it is intended for: word processing. And HTML books do equally well. HTML has the added advantage of horizontal scaling, which is good for small display areas but crippling in large screens. I don’t care what people say about design, but every expensive study funded by the big news agencies and publishing houses has shown that as line length increases, reading speed and comfort decrease. It may be fun to have a webpage take up your whole monitor, but it is not efficent unless your monitor is a 3″ LCD PDA screen.
The idea is to take these old, public domain, plain vanilla texts and work with them to produce attractive books that are easier on the eyes and faster to read. Since they are PDF, people can zoom the document as they like to fill that widescreen. The fonts will scale perfectly and still look beautiful, but the metrics will not change and the easy reading experience will be preserved.
Unlike an HTML book, it ensures the experience will be the same for every user, and their only limitation is the software with which the user chooses to view the file.
Currently, my recommended programs are Acrobat Reader 6.0 or higher (or Pro) on Windows and Mac and Evince 2.22 or higher on Linux.
Contact me on MSN if you want some sample pages. I have one book finished, but I just did it as a test. I can’t release it since it’s not in the public domain.
Ok, I see. Well, that sounds great. It’s like a way to enhance the story and make it more enjoyable without changing the content. That’s interesting. Good explanation.
Sorry I’ll miss your visit to the heartland. Just moved to the UAE. Hot as hell here, but certainly a nice change from everywhere and everything else. Stop by if you’re ever in the mood…and pleaseeeee let Lulu enjoy her trip to the States without all the crazy Derrick commentary!!!
I’d be interested in some samples, D. You know that I’m seldom on MSN, so would you mind shooting me some via email? This sounds very interesting.
If you need source material, you can always head over to the Gutenberg Project or something like that.
I think Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein might be a interesting work to take on. It was first published in 1818, so I would think that the older editions must be PD by now.
When you say “sponsor”, how much are we talking here? I would be willing to pony up some dough.
I haven’t really thought that far yet. I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to do this since my EeePC really doesn’t have the screen resolution for this kind of thing, not does it have the CPU. VirtualBox just dies.
I am hoping to buy a dedicated machine just for design work in December. I was looking at one of those cool new Sony LCD TVs that run real XP on them. Will see what turns out cheapest.
I had planned to have Arabian Nights out by now, but I picked up some new design books from the US while I was there and I must say that I’m very impressed and very humbled. One section had a few more “edgy” book designs for PD titles and it was like nothing I had ever seen before. What I was doing up to now was similar to what you see from Norton or Penguin.
I need to sit back and think about this more. The design style I’m currently captured with kind of depends on non or off-white paper color, which to achieve in PDF would kind of wreck things for printing but look awesome*10 for screen reading.