michael mcd said:

the PDF looks quite good. Offhand, though, the page numbers look like they drop low enough that they _could_ be out of the printable area.

you're right. so i fixed that. download it again...

http://z-m-l.com/misc/14465-take5.pdf

shorter works are poor representatives of the problem

still, you don't need 350 pages to cover the waterfront, especially when 315 of them have nothing happening... *** jim said:

First time I tried downloading this is didn’t work. Tried it again later from a different computer and it worked.

don't know what to tell you, jim.

Tried printing out the first 10 pages.  My printer reported that the document requested C5 page size – but the C series is an envelope size? I would have expected A4 or US “Letter” size.

the pagesize is 5.5*8.5; that's what michael wanted. eventually, how you will print it out will depend on what you intend to do with it in terms of _binding_. for this preview, you have 2 convenient options... you can print it out 2-up, on letter-size, using the "layout" method you should find in the print dialog. for enhanced realism, slice pages down the middle. or you can print it out on 5.5*8.5, which is available at most any office-supplies stores, in my experience. we'll discuss printing and binding more, at a later time.

First Page title appears to print off center to the left.

looks pretty dead-on centered to me, at least in the .pdf. did you print to 5.5*8.5 paper? if so, it should be right...

Contents in an unusually small font

correct... my preference is for the contents section to be shown on 1 page, 2 pages max, so i had to cramp the font. i woulda reworked it manually if i wanted to take the time. reworking entails moving the chapters to the first page of each _book_ section, so the contents section up front just contains the entries relating to the _parts_ and the _books._ it's issues like these that get into the nitty-gritty questions on how automated you want the whole process to become. the easiest solution would be to run the table of contents over to 3 pages, or 4, or whatever it happens to be... but that approach doesn't produce a lot of satisfaction for me. so the question for me is, "how hard is it to automate what i would _really_ like to do in various situations like these?" since i was doing this by hand, to get on the same page with michael, i was willing to do a little manual massage.

Page numbers in an unusually large font

the text-editor i used to create this .pdf does it that way, and as far as i can see, there's no way that i can control it. but that's not the way my program does it. so it's not something we really need to worry about...

Ragged Right is an unusual convention for a PDF document

michael expressed no preference; ragged-right was easier.

Body font seems to be unusually small.

i think so too. it's 10-point times new roman, i believe. (yep, that's it, checked.) but michael has the young eyes. what i was doing, in case it wasn't totally clear to people, was retaining the existing linebreaks from the p.g. e-text. in order to get (reasonable) half-inch margins on each side, i had to reduce point-size down to what _i_ feel is too small. ...but i wasn't doing this for me; i was doing it for michael...

Line length of approx 70 chars seems unusually long for a book-like format.  Most books use about 50 chars per line of text because doing so makes the book more readable.

so you didn't notice that i was using the existing p.g. linebreaks. there were several tip-offs. first and foremost, the first line of each paragraph is too long, because of the indent i introduced. second, the lines are more ragged than they should be, because line-length decisions are made on a monospace character count, not on a metric based on the line's proportionally-spaced width. (_any_ proportionally-spaced metric is better than monospacing, since the proportions are highly correlated across various fonts.) and thirdly, like i said, and you said, the line-lengths are too long. -bowerbird