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Composition • Design • Consulting

An Introduction to Greenhouse Production, 3e

Robert W. McMahon
The Ohio State University Curriculum Materials Service

Toward the end of winter several years back, a friend called me in a bit of a panic. He’d received final pages for An Introduction to Greenhouse Production and was more than a little dismayed. Contrary to what she showed in the rough prelims he’d reviewed, the compositor had set the text in an unusually large point size and the book was much longer than he had expected. The page layouts were schizophrenic. Many of the images were pixellating. Could I take a look?

I began peeling back the layers and quickly understood that the project was going to require more than just a tightening up. Heads—layered on top of colored lozenges—floated in unlinked text boxes amid the text stream. Extraneous copy hid behind closed window shades then sprang into view when I changed the size of the type. The length of lines set at a conventional point size exceeded readability standards. The pages belied no underlying grid. The editing was inconsistent. Figures and clip art was sized with no regard for output resolution. It was clear that the amount of work that it would take to address this constellation of deficiencies would be more time-consuming and error prone than just starting fresh. My friend agreed, and I set to work.

I began by cutting and pasting the visible text from the pages and stringing it back into a series of Microsoft Word files. When I had a viable manuscript, I ran it through a series of clean-up macros that corrected em- and en-dash usage; made consistent time, date, and measurement formats; removed manual hyphenation; and generally polished up editorial inconsistencies that could be easily addressed with find/change routines. My goal was to avoid a total re-edit.

Figure 1
Figure 1

While the editorial team looked over the new manuscript, I developed the new design. The first order of business was to give readers a chapter opener that was easy to find and that introduced them to the material that would follow. As much as possible, chapter introductory material is contained to a single page. Figure 1 shows the new recto chapter opener with the tail end of the previous chapter on the facing verso.

Because An Introduction to Greenhouse Production was going to be a long book with nearly 650 images, I knew I needed an efficient, organized design with a more conventional type treatment and a flexible grid that could accommodate a wide variety of figure arrangements. In the now abandoned pages, the size of the images shown in Figure 2 varied wildly and were scattered across a spread and a half. One of the photos actually squatted in the middle of the page, entirely disrupting the text flow. The captions were inconsistently placed and seemed disconnected from the photos they accompanied.

Figure 2
Figure 2

As you can see, the figures are now balanced on the spread. They do not intrude into the reading experience and instead encourage thoughtful, ordered consideration. Each caption directs the reader to its accompanying image and explains it without demanding attention.

Ensuring the good image reproduction without spending hours on photo research or reshooting became another significant challenge. I frequently had to scale images down to boost their effective resolution; that was usually the only way to achieve minimum resolution for print work. In a few cases, though, I had to live with what I had. A couple of images had to print at resolutions as low as 67 dpi.

Figure 3
Figure 3

The author had supplied a number of scanned line arts at various resolutions. Some were adequate, others were not, but often they had other problems. If they used color at all, most used it ineffectively. Many were RGB images; type and pointer treatments among the figures were inconsistent; text in the figures was pixellated and in a variety of typefaces. Where I could do so quickly, I redrew figures like those you see in Figure 3.

You will also notice in Figure 3 that I highlighted key terms that are listed on the chapter opener. This is one of the few truly new features that I added to the design.

Figure 4
Figure 4

An Introduction to Greenhouse Production includes a fair number of tables. The complexity of the table shown on the verso of Figure 4 is pretty middle-of-the-road. Many tables included only column heads and two or three columns of left-aligned data. Others, however, spanned multiple pages and included a number of different kinds of data requiring a variety of alignments.

On the recto, you’ll notice a display box that includes mathematical formulas. The book had only a smattering of math, so I set it using a few table tricks. Had the project included a lot of math, I would have used one of several math-typesetting plug-ins that I’ve used extensively in other projects, including el-hi math books.

Figure 5
Figure 5

Figure 5 shows another relatively well-balanced photo treatment. It also reveals some of the challenges presented by the low-res photos. I would have preferred that the photos on the verso be the same height, but the resolution of the photo on the right was too low to allow adequate enlargement, and the photo on the left could not be cropped in any other way without losing important content. I also had to resize and recrop two of the three photos on the recto to meet resolution limits.

One of the features of the abandoned design was a colored lozenge behind level-1 heads. I liked the idea, but it was out of the question to pull the heads out of the text stream. I knew that I would be pushing and pulling text around until the book went to press, and I didn’t want to risk a sequencing or spacing error. I worked out an alternate lozenge style that would allow heads to remain part of the text flow. You can see the modified, light-blue lozenge behind the head at the top of the recto in Figure 6.

Figure 6
Figure 6

As I said earlier, I could redraw some line arts, but others needed either an illustrator and large budget or a bit of Photoshop magic. I opted for the latter. Black-only line arts frequently drowned in a sea of black text, so I outlined them in Photoshop, painted their interiors white, and placed them into framed, blue boxes. The recto of Figure 6 shows how they worked out.

The whole process, including reindexing, took about four months longer than I’d hoped, but I think we produced a more attractive and accurate book. And the new files were more than 200 pages shorter than the abandoned files—a savings of more than 27%. My friend saved nearly enough on printing to cover my fees and ended up with a much better product.