Capitol Letter "A" slightly exceeds margin and is cut off during print.

[John Calendo]

Absolute Newbie here. When the capitol letter "A" begins a sentence and is flush to the left margin, a small part of it exceeds the margin and does not print.   Is there a setting to get these letters in line?

FYI, I'm using a serif font, Adobe Caslon Pro, at 11 pt.

Edited February 24, 2022 by John Calendo
Typo

[William Overington]

@John Calendo

Can you clarify what your document is like please?

For example, are you starting with a blank A4 size page and using a text frame?

Are you printing direct from the on-screen document?

Have you tried exporting as a PDF (Portable Document Format) document and then tried printing the PDF document, rather than printing the on-screen document?

I don't know if that will work, but is worth a try.

William

 

[John Calendo]

I corrected the problem by switching off Optical Alignment, as per this video, below. Now the A falls completely inside the text frame.

The document is set for a novel, 5.25 x 8 inch, with standard margins. I've set up Master pages with text frames, and styles for the body, the headings, and so forth. I will eventually present the finish product as a pdf to a print house.  A pdf of the page looks fine. It's when I printed out the Publisher document that I saw the cut A.  I had enabled Optical Alignment in my body style without understanding exactly what it does. I assumed it put sentences on the left page at the same level as sentences on the right page.  If anyone know of a good tutorial on Optical Alignment, I'd be happy to study it. 

Update: I now figured out what happened.  I wanted to print out a page, just one page to see if an 11 pt font was too small.  I thought I selected the entire page, but I believe now I only selected the text frame. Thus, the flush left cap A's were cut off, as were leading quote marks, as they fell a smidge outside of the margin lines.  I hope this helps anyone else, new to this program, who makes the same mistake. I turned Optical Alignment back on. I see it keeps the outer margin of each page subtly straight looking.
 

 

Edited February 24, 2022 by John Calendo

[William Overington]

9 hours ago, John Calendo said:

... to see if an 11 pt font was too small.

I usually use 14 point.

But my novel is on A4 size pages. So the pages are each around twice the area of the pages that you are using.

I notice your choice of font.

I would be interested to know why you have chosen that font please.

Please know that I am simply asking, not criticising at all, I am just interested as to why peope choose particular fonts.

William

 

[lacerto]

12 hours ago, John Calendo said:

Thus, the flush left cap A's were cut off, as were leading quote marks, as they fell a smidge outside of the margin lines.  I hope this helps anyone else, new to this program, who makes the same mistake. I turned Optical Alignment back on.

Yes, I can reproduce this on my laser printer (both in PCL and PS print mode), so it seems that the "Selection" print range option of Affinity Print dialog box cannot take into account optical alignment when it determines the source bounding box, but instead uses the bounding box of the text frame.

If you export a selected text frame with optical alignment to e.g. PDF, the bounding box is extended so that optically aligned text is included. 

EDIT: So the obvious work around would be to use either the "Current page" range option (to print the active page with all content rather than just the selected object), or use the Document range option and then speify the page range by using the Pages box below the Range option.

[John Calendo]

Hi, William.  I looked at my paperback collection. The trim sizes of the books were those prescribed by the Amazon KDP Print on Demand service, namely 5.25 x 8 inches, which was the most popular trim size of the many paperbacks I own, as well as 5.5 x 8.5" and 6 x 9". 

I found 6x9 unwieldily, and a bit clumsy to hold. 5.5 x 8.5 was fine, but it was an eccentric size in my paperback collection ( I only found one book that size.) As far as the A4 size, my understanding is that A4 is a standard novel size in the U.K. I am an American and had to create my own 5.25 x 8" preset.  It would be nice if Affinity added the American presets as part of their standard offerings.

I tried out various serif fonts for the text. And I was watching many YouTubes of people laying out novels, not just in Affinity Publisher but in other programs as well. One man mentioned Adobe Caslon Pro.  And I tried it out.  It had an airy simplicity, and many weight sizes, particularly Semibold Italic, which I am using for chapter titles.  I preferred it to the other candidates I was trying out, namely EB Garamond (which looked frail), Baskerville (too fancy for easy reading), and the old stand-by Times New Roman (too reminiscent of school and text books.). In my readings on fonts, I came across an authoritative piece that said Caslon was the most popular font "by far" among book designers. That clinched it.

I used two novels as my models: For stylistic things like chapter numbers and epigraphs, I'm using Ian McEwan's "The Comfort of Strangers." For text size, I'm using Gore Vidal's "Julian." Originally, I entered the text in size 12 and opened up the leading from the default 14 pt to 18 pt. And while that look pleasant and easy to read on the computer screen, I noticed the Vidal text was much smaller and the leading trimmer. I estimated the text to be 11 pt and set the leading to "auto", which turns out to be approximately 13 pt. That's when I printed out the page -- or I should say the text frame -- which prompted this question.

To my surprise, 11 pt looked fine. Very much inline with the Vidal novel.

I've experimented with different fonts for Chapter numbers... currently I'm trying out Bodoni 72 Book Regular for chapter numbers, which being large and graphic on the page (28 pt) benefit from Bodoni's elegant stylizations. I'm also using the font for the page numbers, which being small (12 pt) show less of the Bodoni stylings.

 

 

Edited February 25, 2022 by John Calendo

[William Overington]

20 minutes ago, John Calendo said:

As far as the A4 size, my understanding is that A4 is a standard novel size in the U.K.

 

If you have found that from another source, fine.

However, as best I remember I have never seen an A4 size paperback book, though I have not been in a bookshop for many years.

A4 is a very popular size in the United Kingdom for such things as business letters, certificates for qualifications, and some other things. A lot (most? almost all?) home printers tend to be A4. Some manuals for equipment arrive in A4 size, but they do not tend to have many pages.

A4 folded in half gives A5, and A5 is a popular size for booklets.

My novel is in A4 because at the time, although not having a printer, I felt that if I wanted to get a hardcopy of what I produced then A4 would be the best size to use, thinking that I would get a home printer.

Is it your own novel?

I published my (first) novel on the web, each chapter when it was completed.

Here is a link to the novel,

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/novel.htm

and here is a direct link to the colophon. A colophon does not need to include the font alphabets, that is optional. I chose to include it. 

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_colophon.pdf

Are you going to include a half-title page and a colophon?

Are you doing something to look like a commerical book, or do you want the private press look?

William

 

[Alfred]

41 minutes ago, William Overington said:

However, as best I remember I have never seen an A4 size paperback book, though I have not been in a bookshop for many years.

I seem to remember seeing textbooks at or close to A4 size. The adult colouring books that are so popular these days are around that size, too.

[John Calendo]

William, my information about A4 is an impression of what I heard on YouTube videos. I'm new to trim sizes and can not speak with authority on the subject.

Yes, the book I'm working on is a novel I authored. It is the first of four, a quartet.  All four books are finished and now I'm looking to hire a copy/story editor and a cover designer.

Thank you for the links to your work. I will check them out.

My Publisher design will follow the standard form of novels and include all the standard features of Front Matter: half-page, a full title page, and so forth.  Though I've learned it's old-fashioned and can often slide into pretentiousness, my Front Matter will have an epigraph page.  Also a dedication and an acknowledgement page.

So yes, I want my book to look like a book that came out of an industry publishing company.

A Recommendation on Printers: Get a laser printer. The ink lasts forever. Ink jet printers, which offer color, I found to be pointless and pointlessly expensive.  The ink dries out whether you use the printer or not.  I don't have much need for physical print, so the printer is used very rarely.  Because it's a laser printer, the ink hasn't dried out. Eventually after x amount of prints, the ink drum (?) will need to be replaced with a new one.

FYI, the printer I use is Brother HL-L2370DW, black and white prints only. I bought it a few years ago so the product line may be updated. I'm very satisfied with this printer.

By the way, I write about old movies on substack. You can check it out here:

https://movieland.substack.com/ 

You will be prompted to subscribe but you don't have to. A subscription is absolutely free. I started this substack to find an audience for my quartet, which is a magical reality tale about movies. 

[Alfred]

44 minutes ago, John Calendo said:

A Recommendation on Printers: Get a laser printer. The ink lasts forever. Ink jet printers, which offer color, I found to be pointless and pointlessly expensive.  The ink dries out whether you use the printer or not.  I don't have much need for physical print, so the printer is used very rarely.  Because it's a laser printer, the ink hasn't dried out. Eventually after x amount of prints, the ink drum (?) will need to be replaced with a new one.

FYI, the printer I use is Brother HL-L2370DW, black and white prints only. I bought it a few years ago so the product line may be updated. I'm very satisfied with this printer.

Inkjet printers are relatively cheap to buy but very expensive to run, even with modern bulk ink supply systems. The print heads may not clog up if you use the printer often enough, but that means using up large amounts of overpriced ink; they certainly do clog up if you use the printer infrequently.

I also have a Brother monochrome printer, but it isn’t a duplex model. The toner used by laser printers isn’t ink, it’s plastic particles that melt and are fused to the paper during the printing process, so it lasts indefinitely because there’s nothing to dry out.

[William Overington]

13 minutes ago, John Calendo said:

All four books are finished and now I'm looking to hire a copy/story editor and a cover designer. so so

Thank you for the links to your work. I will check them out.

In fairness I should mention that I did not use a copy/story editor and explain why.

I know that the proper way to wrote a novel is about finishing it first and so on.

However, my novel was not written to be a purely literary work novel.

I had thought of an invention and had been tryimg to get it implemented, with no success. I had done what I could from my situation, retired, not running a business.

So I devised a fictional research centre and just started to write a novel about it and the imaginary people who worked there and so on. Fictiomal stories, yet when they discuss scientific and technological matters, it is all my research content. I have found it a very interesting technique, as characters can hold conversations and discussions.

Gradually various other locations in the fictional area got added. Yet some action happens in real places.

As the goal was not the production of a purely literary work novel I have enjoyed looking into background information of incidental things in the novel.

For example, in one place there is a train journey and I used YouTube videos of some railway stations and some train journeys and Google street view to gather background information and then I included various things I had learned from those sources in the novels.  

I wanted to get stuff published, published promptly, not wait until I had completed it, if indeed I wuld have completed it doing that way. So I published cjapters as I completed them, not all in numerical order.

So really the novel can be assessed in two more-or-less independent ways.

Is it a good novel as if it were a purely literary work novel?

Does it convey in a readable form my ideas about my invention?

The answers to those questions might not be the same.

There is a version in which the chapters of the novel are the same yet there are also author notes, written as I proceeded.

I have looked back through the author notes and it is interesting to remember how things were when I wrote the author notes.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/novel_plus.htm

I missed wrting it, so I started a sequel, it is about twp-thirds complete at present, but I have not published anything recently, and not wriiten much.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/locse_novel2.htm

William

 

[William Overington]

Actually, now I have found it available, I would use an online printing facility.

https://viking-virtualprinthouse.co.uk/

Not a publisher that I would need to convince, as long as it is legal they will print it for a fee.

I have not placed an order yet.

They have a £5 minimum order charge, but that is on the whole order, the order can be made up of various items.

However, I am gradually adding PDFs of designs that I have produced, mostly using Affinity Designer, a few copies of each on 350 grammes per square metre card, to a basket, with a view to checking out once it gets over the £5 basic charge. The £5 does not include delivery.

William