Book Layout

<< < (2/2)

Eero Tuovinen:
That's a wide topic. It's probably best for you to read some basic instructions about your layout software of choice - the manual, for starters.

The basic workflow in layout is that you first design your master pages, paragraph styles and character styles. Then you plan page design - the principles of positioning and pacing that control the positioning of your pictures, charts, box text and other content that goes outside text flow. After this you import your text, which has ideally already been styled with styles that have the same names as the ones you defined in your layout program; the good layout programs will understand f.ex. Word files in this regard. After that you just go through the text, add content, correct details and make sure everything flows according to plan.

That basic plan is modified a lot by the particulars of what you want to do. For example, it might be that your chapter start pages look so radically different that you should have a different master page for them. Or it might be that you can use the same master page - in my TSoY book I can basically do this, I just add one new text box on the chapter start pages. This all depends heavily on what you're trying to make the book look like.

Aside from reading basic tutorials for your layout software, you might want to start a new thread and post your page design plans - we could comment on how to implement your design in practice if we knew what it was like.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page