Cover Color Conundrums

I've done only a few covers, but only one came out exactly as intended.

Taking advice I'd read a few times here and there, I initially decided to keep my covers simple. The first had no background color. That looked good until printed on high-gloss stock. Lots of white space on really a shiny cover is a bad idea. With fancy gold text, it might work out for a book about wedding planning; otherwise that's a mistake I won't make again.

I changed that cover for the better, with a background and images that are basically shades of what I'd call "khaki to olive drab" (RGB 141 130 84). The next proof came out a little more greenish than anticipated, but wasn't skewed so much that I needed to fix it. The background colors of some of the inserted images and graphics didn't exactly match, but I decided to leave well enough alone (mainly because I didn't know how to fix that anyway.)
The next attempt had a background which was gray with a slight tan cast (RGB 234 240 235). Again, the proof was a big disappointment. It came back not with my nice very light earth-tone gray, but with an unappetizing light greenish cast all over; about the shade of "light cyan1" (RGB 224 255 255).

I was using Lulu.Com to proof these books. Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but the covers delivered looked a lot like the thumbnail images in the "cover art" section of the book's "Edit Content" page on lulu.com, which always seem to have a greenish cast. However, the "View press-ready PDF file" downloads never look any different than what I originally upload, and what always comes out of my old desktop ink jet looking just like they do on the screen.

I decided I need to learn about the basic issues, and spent a lot of time reading up on:

     • RGB vs. CMYK
     • spot vs. process color
     • color management systems
     • inconsistencies between printer color systems
     • paper characteristics (creme vs. white, matte vs. gloss)
     • etc.

So I then understood why the output of ColorCentric or LightingSource machines would not necessarily match what I see on my old CRT or new flat-panel monitors, or what comes out of my desktop printers (old HP and new Lexmark ink jets). Yet it didn't seem to make sense that each submission should be like "buying a pig in a poke."

There must be a "right" was to do this. Hmmmm ... What to do?

After reading a whole lot more about color management, sRGB vs. CMYK gamuts, and all that stuff, I decided the situation was impossible. For one thing, I didn't have software that could output CMYK color information, and even if I did, there was no guarantee that was I was seeing on the computer monitor would match what the printer's machine would produce. And then too, ColorCentric has one kind of machine, Xerox I suppose, and LightningSource has something else. So maybe I could beat my brains out trying to guarantee a result, but never achieve an exact match anyway.

For the above case, I solved my problem by loading up my original nice-looking cover layout, then clicking on my desktop to access my display driver setup and tweaking the color controls until it looked like the greenish version I'd gotten back from Lulu. I then went back into my cover layout program, readjusted the colors until the cover came back to the look I wanted, saved that as a new PDF and uploaded it to Lulu. What came back this second time around was exactly what I was shooting for the first time.

I don't know if this was just a coincidence, or if this is a useful work-around. Next time I have a problem with cover colors that don't come out, I'll try it again. Meanwhile, since you can get single proof copies of your book from Lulu at cost plus shipping, this is a cheap and dirty solution to an otherwise intractable problem.

Another thing I've learned is to not mix tools. For example, if there are graphic components on the cover, such as photographs, logos, and so on, the logical thing to do would be to prepare them in an image editor, then place them on the cover in a cover layout program. If the background of the imported graphic needs to match the cover background; good luck with that. It rarely ever will. Notice the background ghosting in the example shown here, which was taken from the second cover I ever did (check the link above for the first, which was "not so good.")

A better solution is to incorporate all the graphic components in a single image the size of the cover layout, then import that into the cover layout as a background - a opposed to establishing a background color in the cover layout program, then importing the individual graphics onto that and trying to match their backgrounds. Even if you get a good match on your monitor, the results from the printer will probably be disappointing.

The last cover I've done was easy - it was all grayscale on a black background.

That's another good way to solve color matching problems!

-=glw=-

Word 2002 Hyphenation Error

"Word cannot find the hyphenation file mshyph2.dll or mshy32.dll for ."

After working on a manuscript for several months in Microsoft Word 2002, this error message began to pop up whenever the document was opened. I thought it was just another ~!@#$%^&*()_+ Microsoft "issue," since hyphenation was evidently working just fine.

Googling the error message — my usual strategy for finding solutions for such nuisances — I found several referances to the problem, but no solutions that actually worked. A few weeks after having given up, I decided to have another shot at figuring out what was going on.

It turned out that Word was actually doing the right thing.

The only installed language in my setup was "English (US)" and I had enabled "Automatically hyphenate document" and "Detect Language Automatically." The manuscript did have a few foreign language words scattered about, so I suppose Word was trying to figure out what they were, and when it so happened that one of them wound up too close to the right margin, it wanted to hyphenate it, but had two problems. It couldn't figure out what the language was, so wasn't able to come up with any hyphenation file for it — hence the missing attribute at the end of the error message. What began to clue me is was that when I got into the registry and changed the pointer to the existing "mshyph2.dll" file, the error message that then popped up said, "Word cannot find the hyphenation file mshyph2.dll or mshy32.dll for English(U.S.)."

Having no need to deal with any language other than English(U.S.), I did this in Word:

• Turned off automatic language detection — uncheck "Tools > Language > Set Language... > Detect Language Automatically"

• Selected the entire manuscript and marked it as "English(U.S.) — "Tools > Language > Set Language... > Mark selected text as: > English(U.S.)"

• Changed the "normal.dot" template so these settings would be applied automatically to future documents — "Tools > Language > Set Language... > Default... > "Do you want to ..." > Yes.

I've never seen the hyphenation error message since.

Creating Mockups of Books on Your Desktop

Mockups are a very good way to see what your professionally published book is apt to look like. A full-size model that you can hold in your hand will give you a much better sense of your book's look and feel than the virtual version on your computer's screen.

With a little bit of ingenuity, and some inexpensive and commonly available tools and supplies, you can print and bind a mockups of your book right on your desktop that are authentic enough that casual observers will likely mistake them for the real thing. This article will show you how.

(Coming Soon)

Free Page Laout Software

Someone was nice enough to give me a copy of Adobe PageMaker7. I thought that was the cat's meow, because it's impossible to design one-piece book covers with anything other than a page layout program.

PageMaker, it turned out, is actually an old Aldus application that Adobe purchased, and, shined up a little bit, and hasn't supported much since. They've moved on to bigger and better things (which I can't afford). Meanwhile, PM isn't easy to learn. It's workspace is strange, and non-intuitive. After finally getting the hang of it, I did manage to layout some 8.5" x 11" and 6" x 9" covers successfully.

But there were color issues, mainly because PM doesn't support transparency. That makes it difficult (and usually impossible) to match the background color of placed images with the background color of the cover itself. PageMaker also automatically converts sRGB (the Windows default red-green-blue color space) layouts to CMYK (the cyan-magenta-yellow-black press standard). On a couple of occasions, the cover colors of first proofs didn't come very close to desktop printed versions.

I decided that Adobe's "unfair to poor people" pricing justified my turning into a crook, and I turned to the warez groups in USENET to find a solution. I downloaded a copy of Creative Suite 3 Standard, and the "crack" to go with it. Then I began to have second thoughts.

For one thing, I don't like being a crook. Adobe's price tag is $999 which, in my opinion … oh, well. I won't get into name-calling. Anyway, my self-respect is probably worth more than $1,000. For another thing, I did that once before, and the "crack" had a payload that filled my computer with all sorts of nasty problems. I just got done dealing with a situation like that, after one of my daughter's young friends downloaded and installed a "free" music thing on her mother's machine, and wasn't eager for an encore. So I decided to thoroughly scan the CS3 files and the crack. Sure enough, the crack included a Trojan.

"Screw this!", says I as I clicked the big red X.

In desperation I decided to Google "free page layout software." Why hadn't I thought of that before? That came up with a link to http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/, which featured several free tools including once called "PagePlus SE." Clicking on the "Download Now!" button popped up another page offering a better version, "PagePlus9"; "Originally $129.95 … Download Now For Just $9.99!" Oh, sure - the old bait 'n switch bit. I went ahead and downloaded the free version, without great expectations.

Surprise! Surprise! As far as I could see, it was as good as PageMaker, and easier to learn and use. In no time at all I'd duplicated one of the covers I'd laid out in PM. PagePlus SE crashed a lot while trying to insert images with transparent backgrounds, so that was an unfortunate nuisance. But then I learned it had the capability of setting transparencies anyway, so the work-around was to just not try to insert images with alpha channels.

PagePlus SE worked so good, in fact, that I decided to reward it's maker Serif Europe Ltd by splurging for the $9.99 version. That worked even better, and didn't crash when I attempted to place images with alpha channels.

If you're a beginner, and/or on a tight budget, go to www.freeserifsoftware.com and spend $10. If you are impressed, go to http://www.serif.com and have a look at "PagePlus X2," the latest and greatest version, still only $129.99.

As I proof read this yet again, I realize it sounds like a not-so-subtle plug. Here's the disclaimer: I don't know anybody at Serif, and I'm not on their payroll. I'm very favorably impressed for two reasons. First, because they're nice enough to provide a very useful tool for free. Rich people do not ordinarily write and self-publish POD books. Second, Serif's give-away strategy is good example of artful marketing. I'll probably buy "X2" next time I have to do some covers. I might even get carried away to the point of learning how to use that to create the book's interior pages, instead of MS-Word 2002 and Acrobat Distiller.

[-=glw=-]

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