This summer, we undertook the somewhat ambitious (or at least
time-consuming) project of new typesetting for almost all of our
books (only one remained untouched). This involved both using a new
program and, for most, new fonts. And, of course, each book needed to
be proofread, which added considerable time to the process.
The program we used
was nothing more than LibreOffice, which is generally known as a word
processing app but is also more than adequate for typesetting.
Definitely better than Word or anything of that sort, as it was
originally designed along the lines of a desktop publishing program.
No, it won’t do all the things InDesign or Scribus can but it is
completely acceptable for a typical novel.
We also moved away
from the Bitstream typefaces in which the majority of our books were
set. These were included with the Corel programs we own and use, but
the licensing was always a bit nebulous. No one, Corel included,
seemed to know whether it was acceptable to use them in print books.
Be that as it may, they were also becoming a bit outdated, being all
in truetype format; nothing wrong with that, to be sure, but we do
appreciate the options offered by opentype.
Not that all the
opentype fonts we are using provide those options. Some of our titles
now use typefaces from SoftMaker. These are definitely licensed for print
books and most, as with Bitstream, are clones of fonts that have been
around a while. In many cases, we simply plugged in the SoftMaker
alternative to what we had originally used. To be sure, they are
never quite the same size and formatting must be adjusted.
But we are definitely
moving toward open license fonts for future offerings. These days,
there are plenty of perfectly good typefaces available for free, and
free to use for anything. One can find quite a few at Google Fonts
but it should be recognized the majority of offerings there are
geared toward online use, not print. This includes the latest
versions of fonts that have been around a while, such as EB Garamond
and Crimson—we recommend going to the original projects, rather
than the redesigns done specifically for Google.
We have finished this
redesign and now comes the process of getting all the new versions
up. This is not high priority, as the old versions are (mostly,
anyway) well-enough done. But we will replace them over the next few
months. More importantly, perhaps, we are also going to put all the
ebooks (EPUB and PDF) up on our own site as free downloads. Getting
those up should take some time too, as well as removing them from the
store (at Lulu). Print will continue to be for sale and distributed
to pretty much all booksellers, Amazon included.
Incidentally, we
would recommend not buying the Kindle versions we had up at Amazon. It
is to be assumed those will disappear eventually.
