Scandinavian-Canadian Studies

JT marked up the first article intended for volume 17, based on the P5 output of another article on the journal site, and sent it over. I made some fixes and documented them, then rendered it to PDF and sent it back so he can see how the final output relates to the markup. There are some oddities I'll need to research a bit in this document (for instance there's a radio broadcast that needs to go into the bibliography, and I'm not sure how to do that yet). The bulk of the work is done, though.

Made some final changes to the front matter on JT's instructions, then sent the PDF to the printer. We're now looking at how and where to include the Creative Commons licence information on the website. The preferred licence is this one, and it should probably be included on the About page somewhere. We need to decide whether to link to the CC site directly, or take copies in French and English of the short and full forms of the licence for our own site. The CC site probably expresses a view on that if we can find it.

John came by with more changes, based on another proofing, so we worked through those and I posted the results into the DB. We're now waiting for one bit of translation, and a couple more reference checks, before generating the PDF for the printer again (with luck, tomorrow); then I'll send that to John, and he'll check it onscreen before sending it on to the print shop.

Made some last corrections to the French abstracts and front matter, and submitted the package to the printer. Also copied John and Paul; Paul will take over supervision of the print job while I'm away, so he's the contact person from that point of view.

Paul and I went to talk to the gentleman at the print shop:

1. The problem with the over-cropping was caused by the pages being printed on stock which was a bit too small, to save a bit of money. They've promised they won't do that again, so that problem should be gone. I asked about the implications for price, and was assured that they're negligible.
2. The problems with colour are (we hope) solved. We compared Pantone swatches with the original volume 12 cover, and settled on Pantone 299C for both the solid band and the French text; we're pretty confident they'll look good, and close to the original volumes, without the cost of an extra colour.
3. We reworked the cover using the new Pantone colour, and Paul did some sterling work creating "knock outs" for the text which prints over the solid blue. The details are beyond me, but when I come to edit this next time, I need to make sure that any text I change is also changed on all the layers below it. This applies to the English journal title, the word "VOLUME", and the years. The cover is now ready to be sent to the printers.
4. The problem with pages being slightly offset in the last volume is apparently unavoidable. The cheap laser printing that we're using is simply not as accurate as a traditional printing press, but it's not economically viable to use a printing press until the numbers are in the thousands. I guess we just have to live with that, but I know other journals suffer the same issues.

So we should be good to go tomorrow, barring any overnight changes to the text.

Worked with John to implement all the final corrections from his weekend's proofing. Most were very minor; some involved slight changes to the XSLT (for instance, I added some code so that a <soCalled> that appears inside a quote is rendered with single quotes instead of double). The rest were issues of consistency (e.g. in page ranges, where our policy is to always repeat the tens and digits, but only the hundreds and above when they change), and that sort of thing.

in pdf_mla_bibliography.xsl and tei_scancan_xhtml_mla_bibliography.xsl, we're processing articles which are part of larger books on the assumption that the larger book can only have editors. This may not be true, in the case of a book which is by an author, but has an introduction by someone else which is being cited. The working example (currently hacked so it appears OK) is the first entry in rudling_2_16.xml.

Figured out how to load Pantone swatches in Illustrator, and changed the 70% Pantone Blue to Pantone 7460C, as suggested by the print shop. The C stands, apparently, for "solid coated", because I found 7460C in the Pantone Solid Coated swatch (open the Swatches palette and choose "Open Swatch Library"). It's difficult to tell how close this colour is to the 70% blue CVC, but it's not radically different. I didn't change the text colour of the French title, because that was already a 100% Pantone Process Blue CVC, so presumably wouldn't cause a problem. I also removed the two colour guide squares we'd added last week, because presumably they're no longer needed.

Then I regenerated the PDF version, as well as the colour separation (which now has three pages, one for the black, one for the solid band, and one for the French text). I've created presets for generating each of these. The separation has to be done by creating a PS file then processing it with Distiller, it seems; going direct to PDF resulted in a two-page file, with no page for the solid band.

Suggestion from Ralph:

"I'd recommend Pantone 7460C spot. It'll give you exactly what you're looking for."

I'll check this out on Monday.

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).