Worked up the new cover for volume 16. I'm documenting this in detail, because I learned a lot from Paul in the process (Paul's worked in the print field and knows a lot), and also we'll have to do this again three more times.

First of all, I loaded the vol 16 PDF into Acrobat and exported the TOC as two separate PDF files (it spans two pages). Then I loaded those into Illustrator, and combined them into a single long page, which I saved as a PDF. Then I imported that into the cover page file in Illustrator, and used it to replace the vol 15 contents.

Next we had to estimate the new width for he wrap-around cover; the last edition had 134 pages, and this has 153, so we had to make the spine wider. We measured the spine on vol 16, then estimated the new spine width at 0.44 inches. That meant the wraparound document needed to be 12.44 inches (it's 6 x 9), so we increased the document size accordingly.

Next, at Paul's suggestion, we provided additional crop marks for the printer so they can see where the spine folds go. These were placed at 6" and 6.44", and are short vertical lines extending into the crop area, but not the document area, in the "register colour" (black for this document).

Next, we re-organized the spine area, extending the blue block to compensate for the larger spine, and re-positioning the "Vol 16" and title bits appropriately.

We re-imported the map image as an SVG graphic, so it retains its vector functionality (I thought I'd done exactly that last time, but it appears to have ceased to be a vector). We resized and positioned it, along with the title graphics.

Finally, we noticed that the colour specified for the blue is a 70% pantone blue CVC. Paul suggested that the 70% had not been honoured in the printing of volume 15. I checked with the print shop, and indeed, it turned out that they "thought it was an error" and "corrected" it; they think we should be using a different spot colour instead of a 70% tint. I've written to ask them what the equivalent to a 70% pantone blue CVC would be. Meanwhile, we've placed two colour bars showing the 100% and 70% colours just outside the print area, so they can see what's expected.

Finally, we saved Illustrator and PDF versions (the PDF shows the crop marks and colour bars), and we also did a print to file as a colour separation, which produces a two-page file with each colour separation on a different page. This .ps file was converted into a PDF with Acrobat Distiller. This should cover all the possible needs the printer has, whatever process they use.

I'm still waiting to hear back about the colour from the printer, and I'll hold off submitting the cover until I know that John's finished his final proofing (in case the pagination changes again, and I have to rebuild the TOC on the cover).