She shuffled forward.
“I would…”
“Speak up!”
“I would like you to…”
“Yeeeeeesssss?”
“I would like you to typeset this.”
A messy wad of pages; some in different colours, some upside down, some not in any recognisable language.
“You would like me to TYPESET this would you?”
“Yes”
“You have come to the right place.”
—————
I just typeset a book.
It is called George Calderon: Edwardian Genius.
You might have heard of it.
It will be published on 7 September.
Now I will teach you how to typeset a book.
Let’s go.
—————
First of all, what IS typesetting?
The process of self-publishing a book goes something like this:
1. write manuscript
2. make it into a PDF
3. design cover (also PDF)
4. printers print from the PDFs
5. you receive a truck full of copies of your book*
*Note: you now have approximately one fewer room in your house.
Step 2 is what we call “typesetting”, and it is what I did for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. At its most basic, digital typesetting involves resizing pages to the same format as the final book and then setting the font and paragraphs to look “right” under these new page dimensions. (Some self-publishers seem even to leave out that second part. Pro-tip: don’t, it’s really important.)
When I began, I had only a Word document from Sam1 of the complete text of the book. I began experimenting, shaping this Word document into what would eventually be sent to the printers Clays, and I made a short text file of “steps” that I was performing. I felt that if at any point I had to start again from scratch that would be valuable to reconstruct my work.
I quickly moved on from the steps described in this text file, but here is what it looked like at the last point it was updated:
As you will no doubt realise, some of these instructions are esoteric to how we wanted things to look in George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, and some are necessary actions that you will need to take when typesetting ANY book.
Shortly after writing this text file I decided that step 4 was far too crucial to the appearance of the book (and certainly a key dictator of the eventual number of pages)…far too crucial to be awkwardly done somewhere in the middle of the process.
So I recommend as the very first step in typesetting from a text document…
STEP 1: SET UP THE PAGE SIZE
I used LibreOffice Writer for most of the typesetting, so this is what I’ll be taking my example screenshots from.
Before I continue, I need to stress that it is absolutely imperative that every choice you make is associated with a “style” profile.
If you’re used to writing small documents like 12-page essays for school then the concept of “styles” will seem pointless and alien. In a short document you can just highlight what you like, select how you want it to look, and the computer pretty much “remembers” how you’ve asked for it. Then you print it anyway and you’re done. Sometimes you open the document again and it doesn’t remember how you formatted something and you mutter “stupid computer, glitching out, bunch o’ bugs” but it’s not really because of bugs in the code that the document didn’t “remember” your formatting…it’s because you didn’t use styles.
The Calderon book is about 550 pages so I simply CANNOT risk any formatting being lost, and also I need clean ways to standardise and recycle stock pieces of formatting. So it was fundamental that I be rigorous in using styles.
“OK Kamaji, I get it. I need styles. But what ARE styles?”
Styles are little profiles that you set up using the column on the right in the following screenshot.
They are information cards where you define all sorts of formatting details; then, when you need a part of your document to have those properties, you just highlight that part and apply that style.
Once you get used to using them it becomes quite peculiar to think that for smaller documents the software can “remember” at all how you wanted something to look. Applying formatting using a “style” becomes so intuitive that the notion of formatting anything without one seems as ludicrous as baking a cake without a tin.
I won’t go into too much detail about exactly what to click in LibreOffice Writer to set up styles but you can find lots of guides online about how to use styles in whatever word processing package you are using. Indeed, they work EXACTLY the same in Microsoft Word.
Styles are typically divided into Paragraph, Character, Frame, Page, and List styles. Since we’re starting by setting up the page, we’re going to use a Page style. Mine for the Calderon book looks like this:
The “paper format” is the size of your book. For printing with Clays, their “Royal” size is 153mm x 234mm, so that’s what goes in the width and height fields. Interestingly, it appears “Royal” is different for different printers and it is very important to get the exact numbers here so check with your printers exactly what the dimensions are!
The margins are how much white space there is around the content. We went quite low with these, because it was looking like the book was going to be very long already and we were keen to do anything subtle that we could to keep the page count down.
Your printer will advise you on minimum/recommended margin size but I also strongly urge looking at printed books and measuring their margins to get an idea for what is industry-typical.
If you have images that go all the way to the edge of the page you need to negate your margins on those pages and even run the images outside of the paper size (to create what is called a “bleed”) but I’m not going to talk about that here since we didn’t use it for this book.
The “inner” margin needs to be larger to compensate for the obscuring nature of the middle crease where the book spreads open, and – perhaps more importantly – the fact that some of that part of the page is “eaten” by the binding. In desktop publishing this extra is called the “gutter”.
From studying the materials from Clays, as well as various online resources, I was sure that adding 7mm for the gutter was correct. However, when the book arrived I felt that this was too large and I could have afforded to go closer to the centre of the page. By contrast, the outer margin felt a little near to the edge, so if I could do it all again I would probably reduce the inner margin to 19mm and extend the outer to 16mm. It is worth pointing out too, though, that the apparent asymmetry of horizontal margins in the finished book is not entirely my fault as, upon measuring, it transpires that Clays produced the book with a lessened outer margin than we specified. [Probably because they have a ‘trim tolerance’ of 3mm, which they did not spell out in advance – Ed.]
The “mirrored” page layout is what allows you to set inner and outer margins rather than left and right, so make sure you use it!
At this point I would say experiment experiment experiment. When you typeset a book there is a lot of trying it this way and then that way until you settle on how you like it (which may even be a compromise with increased page count etc.) and the sooner you get used to fiddling with the values, the sooner you will feel familiarity with the process and the confidence to tweak freely.
STEP 1B: SET UP THE HEADERS
In this book we were keen to have “running heads” (the book and chapter titles at the top of alternate pages). To do this you use the “Header” tab.
Even if you don’t want running heads, you likely need to incorporate a header or footer for page numbers so you’ll still be needing these parts of the style menu.
To add page numbers to the header or footer you use “insert -> field -> page number”. You can include a running head here too, and adjust your tabs (at the top of the window) to make sure that everything is in the right place (e.g. page number on outer edge, running head centred). There are plenty of resources online to help you understand how to do such things, for example this article here.
When you insert a page number field, and type text into your header, it typically replicates that for all pages under that style. For this reason I created multiple identical (but differently named) styles so that I could assign a different one to each chapter and thus have a different running head for each chapter. In order to segregate these style regions I used manual page breaks. I am not 100% certain that this is the BEST way to achieve these effects for running heads but it worked perfectly for me.
Remember that you can control page numbers by specifying what page to start on when you do a manual page break. This is particularly useful if you are not doing everything in one file and need a way to “start” on page 46, for example. This came in handy for the Calderon book partly because the prelims (introduction, contents, etc.) were done in a separate document that was then stitched together with the main text at the PDF stage (more about that in the next entry).
Anyyyyyway…at this point you have the book formatted at least with the right paper size and page numbers so it could technically be exported as a PDF and sent to the printers and printed as is…but don’t do that…do this first:
STEP 2: SET UP PARAGRAPH STYLES AND APPLY TYPEFACES/SIZES
In the original document, Sam1 had specified certain properties of spacing for the standard chapter text, for the quotation text, for titles, and for epigraphs, etc.
As soon as you reformat the pages to be “book” sized a lot of that gets messed up. In particular, Sam1 had been meticulous in using a combination of carriage returns, tabs, and spaces to make his text (especially quotations) look “right” as he wrote it. However, that was under the word-processor’s assumption of an A4 page and now we were dealing in Royal. I swiftly got to work defining styles appropriate to the new page size.
Having made styles for every aspect of the main text, I went through all 500ish pages applying these where relevant. Of course, most of that was a stock “Chapter Paragraph” style for the main text, but there was a lot of adding “Quotation Paragraph” to quotations, and also some titling and epigraph style application.
Remember, at this level it’s not that your styles have to be complicated multi-part profiles, but simply that you’re using them at all to make sure your formatting sticks. In the image above, really the only thing we’re defining is a fixed line spacing (for our typeface and font size that 5.5mm is roughly equivalent to 120% or 1.2). You may also have noticed that I have a range of “Chapter Paragraph” styles with different numbers after them. I’ll explain what that’s all about in the next entry (and it’s actually also why I use fixed line spacing instead of proportional).
In unison with applying paragraph styles I also applied character styles in exactly the same way.
It is highly likely I didn’t strictly need to do separate character styles for these font properties and could have used a part of the menu in my paragraph styles. I realised this somewhat deep into the typesetting process though and decided to stick to this technique as it felt “safe” somehow. I think that what I was concerned about was that somehow I might lose the “inherited” formatting from Sam1’s typescript, such as italicised book titles or underlining. My fears may well have been founded though, as there WAS one place where italics were dropped and I DO think it had something to do with paragraph styles imposing an umbrella character style (this is an error that Sam1 mentioned in his previous entry).
Important to do too in this stage is to adjust tab positions as the defaults will likely still be sticking around from when the document was A4 sized, and that means the tabs (indents) could be far deeper than they should be. You do that by moving the crosshairs at the top of the document in the bar that looks like a ruler, or alternatively directly through your style’s properties menu. But make sure that either way you resave the style afterwards!
By this stage the document should be looking pretty much like a proper book and no longer like A-level coursework. If it all appears correct for printing then you can go to:
STEP 3: EXPORT AS A PDF
This was straightforward in LibreOffice Writer, you just click this:
Which gives you this…
And then you click Export and choose a sensible folder on your computer to put it in.
You get a .pdf file of your book wherever you chose, you can check it over and – assuming all looks good – you’re safe to send it to the printers!
However…as you might have guessed, in the case of the Calderon book there were many, many quirks and complications that vastly overshot the boundaries of this bare-bones typesetting guide.
For now, I hope you have enjoyed seeing a little behind the curtain on how to get a text document into a publisher-ready PDF, but in the next entry I will tackle the really interesting stuff: those challenges unique to typesetting George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, and how we overcame them.
The War, chronotopia and commemoration
Many people deny the existence of a ‘national mood’ and ‘national consciousness’. I certainly don’t believe in the latter, any more than I accept the idea of a collective soul (the ‘Russian Soul’ etc). But I think there is a preponderant national mood at any given moment, and personally I strive to attune myself to it in order to apprehend where the country is going. Unfortunately, this national mood is tremulous, fitful, liable to change as you blink. It’s difficult to feel and dangerous to extrapolate from.
Thus I’ve been at a total loss this year to say what the national mood about the commemoration of World War 1 has been, whereas in the previous four years I’ve felt clearly where it was at and where it was going. Numerous people, including followers of this blog, have told me that they feel people have ‘had enough’ of the War, are sated with its horror, bored with the repetitiveness of the commemorative ceremonies, no longer interested in following its course, tired with its details.
There are plenty of symptoms of this. Coverage of the battles is far lower in the national media than before. In March I was shocked by how little the nation seemed to know about, or was interested in, the Germans’ offensive of that month a hundred years ago when they broke through the British lines and advanced forty miles on a fifty-mile front. I find it mystifying that the millions who placed lighted candles in their windows on the night of 4 August 2014 and deeply mourned the centenary of the first day of the Somme on 1 July 2016 appear not to appreciate how close Germany came to winning in the summer of 1918 — that we very nearly became a vassal state of the Kaiserreich! — and that the Germans fought absolutely to the death. Nor do these millions seem to know what obstacles the Americans had to overcome before their contribution really made a difference. This month it was widely commented in the media how few people had heard of the Battle of Amiens, yet it was a vital part of the beginning of the end.
An aspect that particularly intrigues me is what I have called chronotopia, i.e. the confusion or interference of different time modes. The centenary of the declaration of war set off an intense day-by-day national narrative. We ‘relived’ (I would say ‘lived’) the War as its agony unfolded. This was my own approach, posting about what George was doing exactly one hundred years earlier — when that was known. Personally, I find an empathetic leap like that the best way to understand the past (I do not mean ‘history’), so I have continued following the War week by week since 4 June 1915. But whereas for about three years the media were full of the centennial On This Day (OTD) approach, I noticed that last year OTD Tweets from the Imperial War Museum, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, or Dan Snow, ceased to be literally a hundred years ago: there are now plenty of them that are OTD for any year between 1914 and 1918. It’s disorienting, I find, to read in August 2018 that ‘on this day war was declared’ (I was uncomfortable therefore with the dating of my last post). Of course, there are also plenty of Tweets and media reports that are OTD 1918, but I’m tempted to say that this confusion of the timelines epitomises the current loss of direction in our national mood.
And yet we must distinguish between the media/chattering classes and what I called in my post of 28 June ‘ordinary’ people. As Laurence Brockliss wrote in his Comment to that post, ‘at the local level there has been a tremendous interest in commemorating the Great War and many local communities intend to mark the centenary of the Armistice with a special event’. Hardly a day passes without one hearing of such events. My own home town has a superb programme lined up, from observing the silence at the war memorial at eleven o’clock and laying wreaths, through a Remembrance Sunday service, mayoral reception, evening of poetry and music, to ringing of church bells and lighting of a final community beacon. In the neighbouring town a friend is organising a Peace Vigil. In truth, the local newspapers that I see are as full of personal stories about the War as ever, and Twitter still pulsates with images of families visiting the graves of their fallen. How does all this relate to the question of the national mood?
An attractive thesis, which several people have put to me, is that the commemoration has not lost its way, has not fallen into chronotopia, because our deep fatigue with the War precisely replicates the national mood of a hundred years ago, i.e. we are actually still reliving the War as we did 2014-17. Like our ancestors, we just want it to be ‘over’.
However, one of the many benefits of a holiday on Shetland is that one gains distance from a problem and can think about it in a fresh and bracing air. I think it’s helped me to a perception that although, like our forebears, we are now ‘warred out’, the yearning for the Armistice celebration is greater than the fatigue or boredom. Everyone knows that the end of the centenary is in sight. The evidence, I think, is that at local level that is what most occupies our minds, not the grinding war and the day-to-day details of how a hundred years ago, by the skin of our teeth, the Allies won it.
It is perhaps crashingly obvious, but I now feel that the national mood is one of subdued emotional preparation for a proper, uplifting, cathartic, ritually endorsed closure on the Commemoration. The magnificent exhibition running at Tate Britain until 24 September is entitled ‘Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One’, as though the War were already over. When Andrew Tatham and I offered institutions a multi-media evening around Armistice Day of presentations and discussion entitled The War Is Over: How Did We Commemorate It and What Have We Learned? none could guarantee us an audience of a hundred people; so it isn’t happening. People’s minds are fixed on the coming commemorative closure. Closure is the natural ritual next thing and it’s what they want. They don’t want to look back and ‘analyse’.
However, I am sorry to disappoint those who think the Armistice celebrations will be closure on World War 1 itself. Just as a recent German president said there could never be moral closure for the German nation on two world wars, I believe that as long as people respect and connect with their ancestors, as long as poetry exists, as long as books like Andrew Tatham’s A Group Photograph exist, there will never be emotional or historical closure for us as a nation on WW1. These things are not closed, but open to the future.
* * *
When I began this blog, I never for one moment thought that it would draw me into discussing Commemoration and the whole emotional roller coaster that Commemoration and the War have taken us on. It has been an enriching bonus, though, and I am extremely grateful to all who have contributed to the dialogue.
Several followers had visited the National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas (OE ‘the land growing with alders’) in Staffordshire and told me how satisfying they felt it was as commemoration, so last month we went there. Unfortunately we had only a few hours, whereas you could easily spend a day viewing the 150-acre site.
What immediately struck me was the diversity around me. The exterior is slightly reminiscent of a crematorium, but inside all is bustle: there were bemedalled veterans of the services and their families, very smartly dressed, sometimes carrying wreaths and clearly there with their own agenda, there were school parties and groups of cadets, and there was a large contingent of people like myself who behaved as tourists, very interested, slightly detached, even bemused. All the exhibitions, shops, cafes, loos and tours are exemplarily run and the volunteers are brilliant.
Yet when we entered the ‘Arboretum’ (in the intense drought this seemed something of a misnomer, but in any case the trees are nearly outweighed by brown field sites, some still under development), I felt this diversity turned into disorientation. Andrew Tatham has told me that he felt the Arboretum lacks ‘a vision’, and I can see what he means.
It is divided into nine Zones and frankly quite a few of the plots within those are simply dedicated to specific regiments, naval divisions and squadrons. Some of these large memorials seemed to be made of gun metal and to my taste are too imperial, almost fascistic. But then there are plenty of very different memorials to individual military actions and I thought the one to Gallipoli was particularly successful:
The Gallipoli Memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum
It looks simple, it verges appropriately on the stark, but each element has been chosen with great care. The bare burnt earth, of course, is exactly right. The carefully shaped bushes outside the chain are of an Aegean shrub and instantly reminded me of George and his men picking leaves from one before they went over the top. The quasi-religious triptych has, as you can see, a vibrant map of Gallipoli in the centre; the other two leaves present pieces of truly deathless prose about Gallipoli by the official historian Aspinall-Oglander (who was there) and Atatürk (who was too). But it is all upstaged by the dead trees, so reminiscent of Lone Pine, Fir Tree Wood, Twelve Tree Copse…
The work was created by a Turk and dedicated to the memory of his mother. ‘What?’ you may ask, ‘Surely it’s dedicated to those killed at Gallipoli?’ Well, of course, but the artist was right: if there is one single message that comes out of the Arboretum, it is that it’s a place for memorialisation; inclusive memorialisation; the memorialisation of everybody.
Authorship and sponsorship of the Gallipoli Memorial
Thus there is a SANDS (Stillborn and Neonatal Death Society) memorial garden. It has a lushness and greenness lacking at that moment in the Arboretum itself, and it is beautifully done. However, the sight of hundreds of brightly painted stones touching each other in the borders, put there with their children’s names on by grieving parents, was too much for me. Similarly, I could see the ‘Shot at Dawn Memorial’ coming, it has been deservedly praised, but I know too much about the subject: I couldn’t face it.
For me, at least, the disparateness of the Arboretum was bewildering. The gigantism of some of the memorials, e.g. the central Armed Forces Memorial and Basra Wall, I found unsettling. Nor could I really get the point of the trees. I mean, trees have since time immemorial been emblematic of growth, of life continuing beyond our deaths, of the future of the planet. But, quite apart from the fact that a lot of them here looked scruffy because of the drought, many of them have the names of people attached to them, and again sometimes scruffily. I had assumed that the point of the Arboretum was that the trees brought a contemplative calm and serenity, a secular consolation, a humanist hope, but that was all dispelled by name tags and rabbit fencing.
Whatever else, visiting the National Memorial Arboretum evoked a very wide range of emotions. It was a very intense experience. With all such experiences, you return to them to try to make sense of them ‘with distance’, and that is what I am doing here.
The Arboretum is disparate, even disorienting, but is it incoherent and unsatisfying? Major General Patrick Cordingley, who chairs the appeal for a new visitor centre, agrees that it is eccentric: ‘It’s very British because in many ways it’s a muddle. You would never get anything like this in America.’ Quite. It is disparate, but it is diverse; it is a free-for-all, but it is inclusive; all-inclusive. It is, if you like, the epitome of pluralism, and it’s certainly democratic. At the end of the day, the freedom of it is what I find satisfying about the Arboretum. The widow who writes her husband’s name on a piece of paper and pins it to a tree can do that, and the platoon of immaculately turned out policemen who march perfectly in step and present their wreath can do that. The acts of memorialisation that the Arboretum invites surely satisfy all these people. The coherence of it is simply in the leaving of a personal memorial. It makes people happier. Which is a great thing.