Try to Take the Stone from my Hand

The horror! The horror! It sells! Still though it needs help. The word of mouth campaign is rolling, but every little bit helps. If you're reading this blog and you still haven't looked to see if you want to buy the book please do. If you know anyone who likes horror have them take a look. If two people each tell two other people that's four new people. If those four each talk to two more people that's eight new people. Those eight can tell sixteen just as easily. Those sixteen tell thirty-two who tell sixty-four who tell one hundred and twenty-eight who tell two hundred and fifty-six who tell five hundred and twelve who tell one thousand and twenty-four. That's all in only ten rounds of people telling their friends and associates, and no one asks more than two people. That's a total of 2,046 people in the know. Imagine if more people told more people each time! Just send them to check out my scary book (www.rmtp.ca/bookstore/index.htm). Thank you.

Last time I left off talking about hyphenation in books. Hyphenation is an important part of the process of justifying the text on the page to make both sides appear in a straight line. It takes words that are too long and would be pushed down to the next line and splits them. The split is started with a hyphen like this one in the quotes “-”. It occurs at the point between two syllables. “Prestidigitation“ can become “Pres-tidigitation”, “Presti-digitation”, “Prestidig-itation”, “Prestidigit-ation”, depending on the length of the line that work appears on. There is a difference in some divisions between Canadian/British English spelling and American English spelling and I know that because I was asked to specify my language preference before beginning the process of hyphenation. The remainder of the hyphenated word appears at the start of the next line all on its lonesome. That's how all real books are printed.

So, with the end of that process I checked over each of the hyphenations. There was some choices it made to fiddle with because it was perfectly happy splitting the last two letters off the end of words. Though correct they look funny so I removed all of those that I could without making too much space between words. I also removed as many of the three letter splits off of the end of words. The justification makes all of the lines even by adding spaces and half spaces to a sentence. Without hyphenating that spacing can look weird. In the end I checked every line over and every hyphenation on every page. Changing one line changes all of the other lines after it until the page break that denotes the next chapter. That completed the word processing, next came PDF work.

For the PDF work I required both free-ware and paid for software. A lot of programs for free will print your document into the PDF format. However that is far as it goes. So far I have only been able to make PDF documents in the 8.5“ by 11” format of paper. This is regardless of whether or not I was able to use Microsoft Word and change the page sizes. I wrote the book on pages set at the same size of a paperback novel, approximately 4.25“ by 6.75”, to get a true feel for the page count of the book. This puts the words at text size 12 on font like Arial. To scale it up the text in the PDF comes out to text size 20. This is perfectly fine because the Acrobat PDF Reader allows you to scale the page to whatever size you feel comfortable reading. No matter what size someone reads it at the number of words on a page remains constant this way. There is some fluctuation between the two size fonts, which is why the justification and hyphenation must be done at the bigger/final size. Thus ends today's lesson, more to come... (This includes what paid PDF software I used and why.)

Mood: relaxed
Music: Tearing Down the World by Royal Hunt and House Of 1000 Corpses (Theme Song) by Rob Zombie