Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Marketing lojban

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 11:57:20 -0500

At 11:18 AM 03/25/2001 -0700, Jay Kominek wrote:
> > The reason I bring up editability is that I frequently find the
> > formatting of some web-based document to be suboptimum. Not a
> > problem (to me) if it's in Word. But it's basically unreadable if
> > it's in PDF format. For example, lojban.org has a short .pdf Lojban
> > dictionary written with a microscopic font. It looks like a nice
> > piece of work, but I'd need to tweak it before printing it -- not an
> > option with .pdf.

We didn't create it. The plain text file is ours.

>Does anybody edit the reference grammar? Did anyone (Besides John Cowan)
>before it was published?

I was the publisher; my wife Nora did the indexing; both of us did an edit 
pass through the text, though nearly all chapters also were offered to the 
community for comment before I even looked at them for the first time. I 
used Microsoft Word after I discovered that my learning curve with 
Pagemaker 6.0 would be too high, Pagemaker did not seem to have the 
capacity to support the kind of macro-based indexing that Nora needed to 
produce the copiously detailed index, and we found a printer who claimed to 
be able to produce a book from Word files (the latter turned out to be 
false, and we had to produce Postscript and PDFs. But I was able to have 
Word do that with some painstaking including use of their linotype machine 
printer driver in Word.)

Editting and formatting took around 4 months, and cleanup of the galleys 
another month, the latter primarily because relatively minor changes caused 
repagination of the entire document which then took regeneration of the 
index, etc.

>I figure the textbook is a text_book_. The ultimate goal is to have it
>printed and distributed to students in classrooms. Therefore, it shouldn't
>just look okay printed, it should look great printed, and printed quality
>should be the first concern.

I'm not sure that print quality has ever been of high import in 
textbooks. The main thing we are lacking that most language textbooks 
have, is copious quantities of line graphics to convey concepts without words.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org