Designing the Format is a Challenge
Tuesday, September 6th, 2011submitted by: Bob Evans
While much text has been written for the 20 Northwoods Pictograph bulletins currently in print, and much photo image processing has been done for the book. the hardest and most difficult part of writing the book is getting it all formatted. Having never had the experience of writing a book before, we accepted the advice of one of the designers at Fisher Publishing and bought a copy of Adobe InDesign. This software is especially for working in print media.
We have used the software in producing each of the Northwoods Pictograph bulletins, and now I am using it to format the book. Among the very laborious tasks in writing a book are things like putting together the Table of Contents, the List of Maps, the List of figures, and the index. Given that the book will probably not be written from page one to the end page, as chapters are written, and put into order, and shuffled around as the book develops, the pagination must keep up. Features in InDesign allow one to structure the files to automatically keep up with the page numbering. Formatting to do the tasks listed above is also possible.
We are now nearly finished with formatting all of these parameters. This will enable us to write a chapter, and by the way there will be a separate chapter for each lake that has one or more pictograph sites, and fit it into the book file. Automatically the pagination, tables, and index will all be updated. Spending the necessary time to format all of this will save tremendous amounts of time and reduce the possibility of errors in the final book. We have nearly completed this part of the task
We anticipate we will be beginning polishing the chapters and begin to fit them into the book file next week. We will keep you posted.
Tags: Boundary Waters, BWCA, canoe, canoe country, indian pictograph, Northwoods Pictographs, pictographs, Quetico, Quetico Provincial Park, Quetico Quest