The Little White Book

[HudsonGray]

I just finished up mine in Microsoft Publisher. There were some pros & cons about it. Initially I thought I'd be just able to do it with Microsoft Word & did all the text typing & font shifting over there, but setting it up on the page was getting to be too much a hassle.

Publisher lets you do segments on a page, with a horizontal layout, allowing you to get 8 boxes on front & 8 on the back in a 'mirrored' configuration, which means you have 4 sets of double pages (ie: 16 pages for your booklet on one single page!). Fortunately I was able to transfer word text from 'Word' to 'Publisher' once I took out the paragraph sections, for some reason the returns on the page acted as font changers & screwed things up till I just did a paragraph at a time.

16 pages was JUST barely enough. I put a picture on the front, and another image on the back, the required copyright info, address, all rights reserved, web URL, email, etc. and an intro, then the rest was all card meanings.

The DOWNSIDE is that if you're going right out to the edges on the 8 boxes, it really cuts you tight when you have to use the paper cutter--the printout of the original (held up to the light) shows the mirror image match up on the back does NOT match up by 1/8th inch. Take it to a photocopy place & their intake rollers on the xerox machines pull the back image off even further. So give yourself room!

I did the xerox in one lump bunch, got them done in 20 minutes at Office Depot for the price of 5.23 cents a page (so that translates to 5.23 cents per booklet once you cut & staple, if it was just one page side, it would have been 3 cents a page but we wanted double sided), and she said if I got 5 more copies made, it would push me over the $$ amount and I'd get the $17 off special they were running, so I took that! I've already screwed up cutting 5 of the booklets initially, till I found the right way to cut, so that was well worth it!

Plain white paper works fine. Nobody does tinted booklets anyway. And the art on the front & back look pretty nice, jazzes up the booklet in a good way.

 

[WolfyJames]

So, we can make the LWB in Publisher? I have it, that's a good news fot me. Even if the deck I want to make is purely for personal purpose, I want to make for myself a LWB and put my thoughts in words. It's better to do that while the work on the deck is still fresh. A few months later it's too late.

What size of paper did you use? 8X11 or 8X14? Does it have to be 16 pages absolutely?

 

[rota]

InDesign

Here's another way to go.
It's also possible to do LWB's (or any kind of page layout, for that matter) in InDesign. Since my experiences, mostly unpleasant ones, in Quark and Pagemaker, I switched to InDesign, and it's much preferable.
The reason it's so useful is that it will output your work as a pdf file, which Kinko's and other copy places like a lot.
Doublesided copying is a given, and is figured into the file format from the start.
Images are easy to incorporate and size.
Odd and uncommon fonts are a non-issue.
I've used this program with fullsize perfect-bound books, and with little quarter-page indie comics and flyers, and it's equally good for both. Any size paper can be figured into your final product.
Recommend! Two thumbz up.

 

[HudsonGray]

It was 8 1/2" x 11", regular paper size. I thought I'd need 18 pages, which would have entailed a second piece of paper and a lot of waste, but it all fit together on 16.

You set up your format in advance, breaking the page down into 8 equal boxes, with a half inch border around all the edges of the paper. And only 'page 1 & page 2', unless you need more than 16 total pages. The tricky part is to know which side is the 'back' of each page, but type in a few letters in each box, run off one page double sided & you can have a guide in front of you as you do the official work. Dropping in things is easy after that.

I haven't worked with many different programs, so this was a first for me, but once it was set up, it went smooth. Transfer took about 2 hours from Word to Publisher, and I checked spacing, spelling, missed font enlargement & fit as I went. I was real pleased with the results.

If your booklet is larger than 16 pages, make the extra page with duplicate copies & figure out that page printing separately (if you need 100 copies of the main page, then the second page may only need 25 or so, then cut & staple them all together. A standard stapler has enough feed room to work with the size of the booklet, and I found I only needed one staple instead of two. It looks just like the ones you get with a regular deck.

You can probably print a cover image in color, but considering I've never seen a LWB with color images, it's probably not really needed (and you save the expense of a color laser print).

 

[Astra]

You can use Word, or any other word processing program, to set up the LWB. What you do is format a multiple label page, each label as one page. You can then set margins, page numbers, etc. in standard fashion. The real trick is getting the pages in the right order for printing, but that's the same in any case. Did this for a LWB on Astrological Dice a few years ago, and will probably do it the same way for my deck.

 

[HudsonGray]

Did you go with horizontal page layout (landscape) or a vertical one? I looked at the lable program section & didn't think it was large enough. But you say it works hey?

 

[Astra]

Should work with either landscape or portrait mode - thing is, the program has to be able to print any size labels on any 8-1/2 x 11 sheet that's fed into the printer - and there's a LOT of strange pre-cut label sizes out there. So you should be able to input pretty much any size into either mode. (Years and years ago, pre-Windows, I used to be a word processing guru - hence the knowledge of how many strange things you can coerce a word processor into doing. And yes, all the capabilities that were there then in any good program are still available, though sometimes you have to hunt for them.)