The most boring post ever.

I am about to blog about the frustrations I have had with the file formating from my book. It will be boring. If you proceed take note that I did warn you.

When you are formating a book, particularly a comic book, there are a few things that you should keep in mind. I know what you're thinking. I can hear you sitting there in front of your monitor, thinking to yourself, "I already know to make my files at least 300dpi for print. I already know about using CMYK instead of RGB. Why are you telling me this again?"

Well, I'm not going to tell you again. (Did you see how I really did anyway? I thought that was clever.)

This has more to do with things that you might think are common sense. All those little common sense things that you are supposed to remember, but always forget, because it's just too much to keep in your head at once. And then when I mention these things (and don't tell me you won't do this because I know you will) you'll think, "Well that was obvious. How could he miss that?" (I must take care not to bludgeon my readers with this point.) And you'll have already forgotten the point, which I so carefully made in my previous parenthetical statements, about how the mind gets cluttered and confused when formatting comics, as well apparently as writing blog posts. But now I shall break for a cup of tea. (I've been reading Salinger recently, can you tell?)

So where was I? Ah yes, common sense. Little things like, keeping in mind how big you book will be when you start creating your pages, and Oh yes, leave room for margins, gutters and bleed (trust me dear reader, when all is said and done you won't have left enough). In particular, if you draw pages, proportions 9 x 16, and then draw a cover that is supposed to bleed, you need to keep in mind that the margins will make the cover larger and change the proportion of the image. You might think that the change would be insignificant. Margins are very small, after all.

If you think this you have deceived yourself.

Because, and when you think about it rationally it really is only common sense, a book which has oblong proportions will be irregularly changed in proportion when you add trim to it. This isn't true of a perfect square, but a book that is as wide as 16x9 will change, and very quickly. All of a sudden I found that the image was going to have to be cropped. And not just a little bit. A lot. Enough that I would lose my favorite robot off of the back cover. And I know, dear reader, that I have more than once quoted Oscar Wilde about his little darlings, but this time it was more than that. (Also note that words are more easily edited than pictures.) On top of this it would then also off center the title and the symmetry of the characters on the front page. This was too much to bear. So instead I went with a look that suggests the classic wide-screen-movie-on-a-standard-television-set and added some black bars to account for the funny margins.

I hope the reader will not delude himself to think that I am now done talking about formatting my pages for I am really just beginning. See the next problem was that the printer could not print the book as widely as I had wanted and now I had to chose whether or not I wanted to change how the book would be printed.

You see comic books are made by folding a single large sheet of paper in half and creating four pages (think front and back) out of a single sheet. But to do this, especially with pages that are (proportionately reduced) thirteen inches wide would require very large stock indeed, which could not, if you must know, be run on a standard copy and saddle stitch machine. So to do this I decided to print the book stitched along the top so that the pages would open top over bottom like a calendar. In order to make this work I had to change how I set up the files...

Wait. I think I must recant what I said about just beginning to talk about formatting for it occurs to me that you have all given up by now. In fact no one will have made it far enough even to read this.

Oh well.

Maybe someone out there cares about file formatting...

It depresses the hell out of me, I swear to god.