Fine tuning pagination

[Linda G. Gallagher]

Steve,

OK, I'm going to show my ignorance, but maybe I'm not the only one. Dumb
questions follow.

<Manually stretching the main page flow to take lines back>

Do you mean to make the main text frame on a body page larger? Hmm, seems
like that will look odd if pages have different size text frames. I do only
have headers, so I don't have to worry about bumping into footers.

 <Manually shrinking the main page flow to move lines forward>

Similarly, make the text frame on a body page larger?

 
 <Micro-control of text, for example adding small amounts of negative
tracking to pull a hyphenated word back from a page foot>

Negative tracking? 

Thanks!


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Linda G. Gallagher
TechCom Plus, LLC
lindag at techcomplus dot com
www.techcomplus.com
303-450-9076 or 800-500-3144
User guides, online help, FrameMaker and
WebWorks ePublisher templates
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Rickaby [mailto:srickaby at wordmongers.demon.co.uk] 
Sent: Monday, April 21, 2008 5:48 PM
To: Linda G. Gallagher
Cc: framers at FrameUsers.com
Subject: Re: Fine tuning pagination

At 15:41 -0600 21/4/08, Linda G. Gallagher wrote:

>I'm working on a book for a commercial publishing house that prints in
>16-page signatures. I've not done anything quite like this before.
>
>I need to get the book to fit into an exact multiple of 16 pages. I've done
>basic pagination control with my paragraph styles and with a page break
>paragraph style, but this calls for greater fine tuning.
>
>I'd appreciate advice, tips, whatever, on how to fine tune pagination to
>meet this need.

Two subjects:

1. Making pages beautiful

2. Making a book the required length.

FrameMaker gives you a wide range of controls you can use to balance pages:

 Ensuring that book parts have the correct basic pagination, to trim to
odd/even page count or whatever

 Widow/orphan control in the paragraph designer

 'Keep with next' option in the paragraph designer

 Manually stretching the main page flow to take lines back

 Manually shrinking the main page flow to move lines forward

 Manually bouncing paras to the top of a new page/column

 Moving large objects like figures and tables around to maximize page
occupancy

 Micro-control of text, for example adding small amounts of negative
tracking to pull a hyphenated word back from a page foot

The page shrink/stretch options are easier to use in a design that uses
headers rather than footers.

All the above can be used to beautify pages by minimizing widows and
orphans, making sure that, say, the introductory sentence to a bullet list
does not lie last on a recto page, and so on. These are all about making
pages beautiful. At the end of the day, though, you might have to pad out
the page count to get your total page count to a multiple of 16/32/whatever.
It's not uncommon to find printed books with two or even four blanks at the
end for this purpose. I have even had it suggested that chapters could start
on a verso page, but I don't like it. In the case of grossly excessive page
count, you might even have to resort to major design changes, like setting
specific sections in multiple columns (it's happened to me).

This sort of process should be done, of course, as absolutely the last thing
after all text changes have been done. It is a serial process that starts at
the beginning and works forward towards the end of a book because everything
knocks on at least to the end of the current chapter/book part. You can do
98% of what you want with FrameMaker global controls, but you are almost
always forced to 'break the rules' about local overrides to get the last 2%
just right. Just live with it ;-)

-- 
Steve