[FM Discuss] MYOSA printed book received, some problems

[James Simmons]

Yesterday I got the printed "Make Your Own Sugar Activities!" from
Lulu.  There are some issues with this book that I hope we can
correct.

The biggest problem is the font size of Normal and Formatted text.
It's very small.  This book contains lots of formatted text, both as
Python program listings and command line examples.  The formatted text
is very small and quite faint.  That's a real problem for anyone
trying to understand the code, or worse still trying to type in the
code.  The normal text is not as bad, but that too really should be
one size higher too.  Headings and even page numbers are quite large,
but the rest really needs to be one size larger.

The other problems are my fault.  In the "About The Authors" chapter I
made a remark about my alma mater that my wife objected to.  I have
removed it on the site, and would like this chapter to be
re-published, and even if we can do nothing about the font issues I'd
like a revised PDF sent to Lulu to correct this.

The cover is really, really bland.  I'm thinking that since everyone
seemed to like the cover the RDC did for the second book I could ask
them to put together something for this book.  If you could tell me
what the actual constraints are: image size, number of colors, etc.
that their artist could come up with something more visually appealing
that still would fit in with the rest of the FLOSS Manuals.  I would
be willing to pay her for this work myself.  The cover as it is is
tolerable, but there's an awful lot of plain white.  Since this is the
only use of color in the whole book I wish it was a little nicer.

The interior illustrations are grayscale, which is OK for this book
because they're all screen grabs.  That works fine for this book.  I
don't know how well it would work for the E-Book book.  The RDC will
be printing off a batch of these themselves, more likely than not with
color illustrations.  They'll also be doing some fancy style sheets.
If the book needs that to work, and I think it might, then maybe
putting it on Lulu would be pointless.

The font issue could affect the Booki project too.  I thought Booki
might be a good tool for OLPC users to use for class projects.  There
was some interest in the "It's An Education Project" mailing list
about tools that students could use to create printed books.  Booki
would fill the bill nicely if the font size was larger in the default
style sheet.

Anyway, it's a real thrill for an author to see his work in print, and
none of this changes that.  I'm just thinking that FM sometimes prints
off books to sell at Linux conferences, etc. and that this book would
sell better to that audience with more readable text, especially for
the code examples.

Thanks,

James Simmons