PRO TIPS & HOW TO’s

Feb 1

How To Estimate Book Length (extent)

At handover, you will receive a projection of the book length. We request that you attempt to design with that page number in mind. However, we realize that things can sometimes change between proposals and final manuscript, so at Sample Pages you will be asked to estimate the extent based on your design. Below is a suggested process for making that estimate. You may adjust it to accommodate your layout style, but an accurate extent is a critical piece of our planning process so please take the time to give a careful estimate.

Set up your InDesign document with Parent pages, paragraph and character styles, colors, image and sidebar library items, etc.
Do a rough styling of the text: Apply head styles and formats sufficiently to get an accurate length; it is not necessary to do all the formatting. What is the average amount of text on a text page? Total amount of text in the MS divided by that number should get you a close approximation of the length needed for the text.
Style sidebars: If they will flow into separate frames, either rough-in or approximate space frames will occupy.
Rough-in or estimate the lengths / page counts of the front and backmatter.
Estimate pages needed for the Index. The index will generally need about 5% of the book’s total length. For example, a 200 page book will likely have a 10-12 page index. Note: If estimated extent is more than 5% longer or shorter than the initial projection, let your Timber contact know immediately. The design may need to be revised before progressing to First Pages depending on our costs.
Pad your total page count to allow for chapter openers.
Estimate the number of pages needed for photos. Based on the design, how many photos will run per spread/chapter? Are your photos taking a full page? Half a page? A quarter? Finding an average and dividing it from the total number of images can help you determine how many pages you will need. It may help to drop in photos for a typical chapter to check your estimate. Captions are part of the photo estimate and don’t need separate consideration
Estimate the number of pages for other material, including tables, drawings, charts.
Add up pages from all parts to complete estimate.
Pages should be divisible by 4 for overseas books and divisible by 8 for domestic printers. Your Timber contact will know

How To Import a Tagged Word Doc Manuscript into InDesign

Check InDesign Preferences: Make sure that Type > Smart Text Reflow and “Add Pages to End of Story” are selected.
Create a new InDesign document with “Primary Text Frame” and “Facing Pages” is checked.
Import Word Doc (Cmd +D) with “Show Import Options” checked. When the Import Options window comes up, confirm the following:
- “Import Unused Styles is NOT checked.
- “Import Styles Automatically” IS checked.
- Ignore the “Find Font” warning telling you that various system fonts are not available.
Now you are looking at a loaded cursor and a blank page. Click the cursor on the primary text frame and the MS will auto-load into your InDesign document.
In the Swatch palette, select all the RGB MS Word colors and delete them replacing with [Black]. Sort styles by name and add a bright color like Cyan or Magenta to all styles starting with “:” to make the Design Notes and other callouts easily visible.
Select and delete all unused styles, checking against style worksheet to make sure they are not needed.
For all styles that could include hyphenation (like running text and captions) set the hyphenation according to Timber standards. At this time, we strongly recommend you also set Justification settings and add GREP styles given in the “How to Use GREP” section below.
Set italics: All italics in the manuscript will, by default, be styled with the character style “.i”. This should be set for italics in the body text style, “body.p”, but may not work in all instances (ex: if your caption font necessitates a coding of “regular italic” vs “italic”). In these cases, you need to search and replace with a new character style appropriate for the typeface in use. This can be achieved using sub- or hybrid styles, as follows:
- Substyles: For italics that occur within regular paragraph styles (ex: paragraph style “figure.caption.p”), create a new character style, ex: “.i:figure.caption.p”. Then search for instances of “.i” occurring within “figure.caption.p” and change them to the new character style. You can do this easily through Edit > Find/Change: In the GREP menu click the empty box under “Find Format”. This will open a new window, and under “Style Options” select your “.i” character style and “figure.caption.p” paragraph style. Click OK. Then in the box under “Change Format”, select the character style “.i:figure.caption.p”, then click OK, and then “Change All”. Do this for all unique italic styles.
- Hybrid styles. For italics that occur within other character styles (ex: a run-in head, “.runin”), you would run a similar search for .i and create a hybrid style in the format “.i.runin”.
- In the Find/Change Run a text search for all occurrences of “×” used for hybrid plant names and apply the “math.x” character style (see Special Characters, Symbols, Glyphs, Punctuation section). Do the same for any other special characters or glyphs noted in the design memo.
Set GREP codes in your main body paragraph style and elsewhere as needed. See the next section, “How To Use GREP Styles”, or speak with your Timber contact if you have questions. Adding the hyphenation especi GREP to your paragraph styles now can help prevent many hyphen corrections needed down the line.

How To Use GREP Styles

Here are some helpful GREP codes. We strongly recommend setting these in your main body paragraph style and elsewhere as needed:

To find hyphenated words: \b\w+?-\w+?\b
To find double hyphenated words: \b\w+?-\w+?-\w+?\b
To find strings of caps, three or more: \u\u\u+
For OpenType fractions: Create a character style called “.fractions” and in the options for this style make sure “fractions” is selected under the “OpenType Features” panel. Then use the GREP code below to apply this character style to all paragraph styles that may include fractions (such as “body.p”, table cell text, recipes, or instructions). This code finds one or more digits, followed by a slash, followed by one or more digits: \d+/\d+

How To Set GREP codes in Your Paragraph Styles

Set up a new character style that you want to apply to all phrases the GREP code finds.
For example: to outlaw breaking hyphenated words: create new character style called “.nobreak”, in which No Break is checked in Basic Character Formats. All other options remain blank or unchecked.
In any Paragraph Styles that have hyphenation settings where you want this to apply, go to the GREP Style dialog box, select New GREP Style, and apply the “.nobreak” character style. In the To Text field, copy the string of code above for finding hyphenated words.
Repeat step 2 to create a new GREP style with the code for double–hyphenated words.
For finding strings of caps, you would do the same process but apply a “.smallcap” character style with the attributes you want applied to those characters found by the GREP code for strings of caps.
For fractions, see above description of Open Type fractions. Or, for non-Open Type fonts, you can use the GREP code to find fractions and replace manually with correctly typeset fractions.

Design notes

Occasionally you may need to add notes or open questions to the editor or your Timber contact. Those should be done in a separate layer in an easy to spot color (such as Magenta) and should not obscure any text or image tags. Example design notes: “missing this photo”, “can we cut two lines of text?”,“ Can we cut this image?”, or “Is there any other art we might put here?”

Image Placement & Tagging

You will generally receive all images with the final manuscript. Images will be tagged by name in the text. Your Timber contact will let you know whether you can crop images or whether they need to be used as provided. Where cropping is allowed, be aware that Timber books are generally instructional and illustrative so do not crop plant parts or other elements that are part of the book’s purpose. Read the captions! They will often indicate what the purpose a given image should serve. If in doubt, do not crop, or discuss with your Timber contact.

Place images within text according to specifications laid out in the design brief or as agreed upon at Sample Pages (for example, within a specific section of a chapter, after certain content, etc).
Images that bleed should extend 0.125” through page edge.
Images that do not bleed must be a minimum of 0.25” from page edge.
All images must be tagged (see below).

Image Tags

Image tags will need to be placed on all photos beginning at Sample Pages. We provide an image tag doc you can copy and paste into your file, however if you create your own they should follow these guidelines. Tags should include:

Image name
Photo scale
Colorspace
Effective Resolution
Tags should be in a white or yellow box with a 0.5pt Magenta rule. They should be ugly and easy to spot—resist the urge to make them elegant or complementary to the book. You can create these by hand, generate them automatically through the caption function in Indesign (see below), or ask your Timber contact to provide a template.

Creating image tags with InDesign’s Caption function

Make sure no image or text box is selected. Set up the specs for your caption in the Object menu: Object > Captions > Caption Setup:

Metadata (press the + symbol to add multiple fields):
Name
Scale
Color Space
Effective PPI
Alignment: Below Image
Offset: -6p, or toggle to whatever setting best fits the document
Paragraph Style: Image tag (set this up in paragraph styles, using document font, 7 or 8pt, tight leading)
Layer: Image tag (set up a layer for tags and be careful to keep them there; you will need to present the document with and without tags, and it is important that no tags accidentally end up on a print layer)
Make sure Group Caption with Image is not checked.

To generate captions for multiple images:

In the Links palette, select all images (or, all that you want to tag). In the flyout menu (upper right corner), select Captions > Generate Live Captions. The captions will appear below the image, or on the pasteboard if the image bleeds off the bottom edge. Some may need to be manually adjusted if they fall out of the document bleed area and/or overlap multiple images, causing a confusion of the metadata.

To generate a caption for a single image:

Select the image. Go to the Object Menu: Object > Captions > Generate Live Caption. Live captions will update the image information when you change the image size, keeping the scale accurate. If you want to stop a caption from updating, you can select it and choose “Convert to Static Caption” in the Caption menu.

To create an Object Style for your image tags:

Create a new Object Style, named Image Tag, with the following properties:
Fill: 100% Yellow
Transparency: opacity 80%
Stroke: 0.5, M = 100
Paragraph style: Image Tag
Text Frame General Options:
Columns: 1
Fixed width column
Column width 12p0
Inset spacing: p1 all around
Align: Center
Ignore text wrap

Placement and styling of image tags:

Once you have generated the captions, you will have to go through the document and style and place them appropriately.
Select caption
Apply object style (assigning a key command for the style is helpful)
Move it onto the photo, optimally to an edge location that obscures the least amount of relevant content.
Check to make sure it is on the Image tag layer, and move to that layer if necessary.
When the document is ready to hand in at first pages, confirm that all tags (and only tags) are on that layer by first making all other layers invisible, and running through the document to make sure only tags appear. Then turn off the tag layer and run through the document to make sure no tags appear.

Colorizing BW tiffs with transparency

Occasionally, a design will utilize graphic elements that are created outside of InDesign but need to have the book’s color swatches applied to them. This is easily managed by placing a flat greyscale TIFF, direct-selecting the image, and applying your InDesign swatch. However, this method does not work on layered TIFFs with transparency. In that case, refer to this tutorial: https://creativepro.com/colorizing-grayscale-images-with-transparency/

How to add the logo mark to Copyright page

The logo should be added to the bottom left of the CIP page. The tree trunk should align with the text block margin and bleed off the bottom. Your Timber contact can provide you with the logo mark file. The content on the copyright page should sit above this the logo mark.

How To Set an Index

Timber follows the Chicago Manual of Style guidelines for setting our indexes. Turn-overs should indent the same amount for both main entries (index.1 or Main.) and subentries (index.2 or sub), meaning that the indent should be deeper for the main entries than for the subentries.

Example:

index.1 (main)

index.2 (sub), 23

index.2 (sub with a turnover), 181–182,

195, 198–199 (<- this is the turnover)

index.1 (main with a turnover), 65,

124-128, 196-197

When a list of subentries carries over from the bottom of a recto page to the top of a verso page (across a page turn), a continued line that repeats the main entry needs to be added, for clarity. It should have this form:

main entry (continued)

To achieve this in InDesign you will typically have “left indent” set to the same number for both main and sub styles. Your “First line indent” number will be the same number but negative for your main style. For the sub however, it would be a negative number slightly less than the left indent.