A real, physical book

I received my first copy of the bound book today. I have to admit being a bit underwhelmed by the physical thing ... 512 pages looks a lot bigger on laser printer paper. That's ironic because we really worked hard to keep the length down. I was inspired by watching director's commentary on DVD movies, which so often say "We shot a really good scene in which Patrick eats his parrot, but we needed to move the main plot along, so we chopped it."

We use a lot of gray backgrounds and very light rules, which tend to come out either too light or too dark as we move from laser printer to laser printer. They came out great; the gamut of printing presses is much wider, and the resolution much higher, than the best laser printers.

Vital statistics

There are 510 physical pages in the camera-ready copy (reduced from 512 pages in the final pass over corrections). That includes 22 pages of front-matter (table of contents, list of tables, preface, half title and title page, and so on), the bibliography, and the index. Pages in the main matter of the book — that is the part excluding front and back matter — are numbered 1 through 466. The bibliography goes from page 467 through 478 (and is by no means comprehensive — we tried to cite only a handful of good starting points for each topic). The index runs from page 479 through page 487 (which is really page 509 because front-matter has its own page numbering). Presses print in "signatures" of 16 or 32 pages, so the physical book will have 512 pages.

The book was typeset in pdfLaTeX, which I think would not have been possible without The LaTeX Companion by Michel Goossens, Frank Mittelbach & Alexander Samarin. I was using the first edition, but Amazon now lists a second edition. It would be lovely to have a good word processor that was really up to the task, but the only one I know that even comes close is FrameMaker, which has been more-or-less orphaned by Adobe. Fortunately TeXShop by Richard Koch, Max Horn, and Dirk Olmes made life with a document compiler sufficiently interactive.