Adventures in page layout
Not to diss Amazon and I’m not saying their system is inflexible or anything, but a recent update that required me to re-upload a PDF for the paperback copy of Falling prompted about six emails to their tech support, during which they changed the rules almost as many times.
Falling, as you might know if you’ve read it, is big.
If you buy a physical rather than an ebook copy, the standard paperback book size of 18 x 11cm comes to 764 pages, including the extras/bonus features.
That means that in any printed copy, the inner margin has to be larger than normal. If a book is particularly long it’ll have a thick spine, which in turn means that when you open it to a spread to read it you can’t flatten it very easily, so you can’t see as deeply into the centre where the pages meet like you can in a shorter book with a thinner spine.
In print production, that means your inner margin has to be wider than normal, so the text or images stop a bit further away from the middle and it’s thus easier to see all the content on the page.
Make sense so far? As a former graphic designer who had a lot to do with printed materials I get that entirely.
Amazon’s system mandated very specific inner and outer margins, both of which I followed to the letter. After I produced a new PDF, uploaded it and opened it in their previewer I was told that, nope, the inner margins aren’t big enough. Every single page was flagged with problems (the margins) even though they matched the requirements exactly.
I contacted them in protest. I knew what the problem was but I was adhering to their rules. I said as much, and wanted to know why they suddenly didn’t apply. You’d think with an automated system that publishes probably thousands of books every day they’d take the number of pages into account.
Sorry, they answered, you just have to increase your inner margins. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be a problem, except that as you can imagine, pulling the margins in even a millimetre might cause a word here and a word there to wrap down to the next line, and over a book Falling’s length that’s easily enough to add 10-15 new pages at the end.
That would mean I’d have to go through the entire document to make sure chapter headings haven’t ended up at the bottom of pages or I’d need a new hard return before an ellipsis because it was at the top of a page before.
It’d take a long time but wouldn’t be a problem per se. The problem would be that Falling (by an amazing coincidence) was only a few pages away form their upper page count limit.
Now, I understand that too – too wide a spine and the physical structure of the book won’t have any integrity.
It’d start to fall apart either as you read it or even during a rocky journey through the global postal system if the spine adhesive was cheap enough (and digital printing technology and materials the likes of which Amazon uses are very, very cheap).
But that didn’t help me. Couldn’t they approve it manually just this once, I asked plaintively? The sunny corporate customer service-ese equivalent of ‘hell no’ was received swiftly. You just have to change the margins to a new number that’s not the number we tell you your margins need to be set at. Sorry
So I pulled the margins in just the tiniest touch – about a quarter of an inch.
And like I explained above, it caused words to wrap just enough to need another complete scan of the pages for errant breaks.
I uploaded it again and ran it through their viewer and instead of errors on every page it came back with errors on about 50 pages. Wondering what was going on because margins are uniform throughout a page layout file if you establish them on your master pages, I emailed them again to ask why.
It was italics and errant glyphs, they explained. You see, when you have a word at the edge of a page margin and italicise it, modern digital page layout programs don’t move the word to the right so the descender, stern or a serif in the x-height stays within the text box.
It actually moves the italicised or stylised element a hair’s breadth outside the text area, so the word as a whole left-aligns with the box rather than just the character element furthest to the left. It’s the way typography as an art form has been done for almost six centuries.
So italic characters, glyphs with ligatures and more fell outside text boxes by around 0.1 of a millimetre on those 50 flagged pages.
Oh come on, I wrote back – though without such an air of exasperated pleading – that’s a legitimate typesetting principle, you have to let that through (my actual words were ‘We’re talking in the order of .5 of a millimetre in every case. Surely it can be passed as is?’).
Could I really know more about the design and use of fonts than what must be a small army of typography engineers in Amazon’s Kindle division?
They wrote back expressing remorse and understanding and promising to have a human investigate the matter fully.
…I’m kidding, unless the sarcasm didn’t come across there.
Their reply was ‘The previewer will not allow you to move forward while it is flagging some pages as having issues. Its not possible to manually approve files flagged by the previewer’. The words ‘no’ and ‘shit’ came to mind.
In other words, a computer had seen a few dots of black (virtual) ink outside the unyielding border it had established – typography principles be damned – and it was not going to budge.
So the only option left was to actually move the entire page content area towards the outside edge of each page, adding another 0.25 of a millimetre onto the inner margin and taking some off the outer margin.
The outer margin, keep in mind, is just as important as the inner margin. It doesn’t disappear into the spine like the inner margin, but you need to see it as you hold the book, and if it’s too close to the edge of the page your fingers will constantly be in the way.
I couldn’t take the exact 0.25mm off the outer margin as it would have made it just too thin. I made it more like 0.15mm, which of course meant the entire stream of text reflowed because the text boxes on every page were suddenly a different size.
I scrolled through every page looking for errant breaks for what felt like the ninety seventh time while crossing my fingers it didn’t add any more than four or five pages.
Finally, after uploading it yet again, the Previewer bestowed its ultimate, machine learning-driven blessing on me, and the paperback version of Falling was passed.
So after all that agony, hours of typesetting and contact with what I’m sure are very underpaid third party tech support people working out of their living rooms, you can buy Falling in paperback right here;