Desie Posted November 9, 2024 Posted November 9, 2024 Ally from Affinity Revolution suggested I join this group. I want to to create a cookbook of the recipes I've been cooking and sharing for almost fifty years. Attached it the first attempt at building it. I have just scratched the surface of the content I want to include in it. Im not unhappy with the format, but am always open to ideas. Currently I have all these recipes in a folder with a series of sub-folders or chapters if you prefer. As I share the whole folder from time to time, which currently measures 1.7GB - my first of many questions is this. In its current format will this project become too large? I'm guessing there will be a minimum of 500 various recipes when completed. Please fell free to offer advice, I am just starting with Affinity Publisher and the learning curve is daunting, but insurmountable. I truly look forward to hearing from you. Des Des Book Test 3.pdf dannyg9, Komatös and jmwellborn 3 Quote
dannyg9 Posted November 11, 2024 Posted November 11, 2024 Not that it's any judgment on my part, but I'm Vegan. However, objectively looking at your book there's a few suggestions. Like the cover of your book, which looks great, I think you would benefit greatly from using full page photos for each dish/recipe. Makes much more of an impact design wise. I'm not sure you need the "Primal Cuts" graphic. Unless you plan to go into detail about each cut, their purpose, and the recipes related to each, I think it's bit of overkill and doesn't impart anything to the recipe. Now, if you do plan on elaborating, then perhaps break it into sub sections by cut with the relevant recipes. From a content standpoint, 500 recipes is a lot. You might want to think of breaking it into several books (Starters, Soups, Main Courses; Breakfast and Light Recipes; Desserts, etc). Again, 500 is a lot and that translates to almost 600 pages for a book. Interested to see how this project progresses. Desie 1 Quote
jmwellborn Posted November 11, 2024 Posted November 11, 2024 @dannyg9wouldn’t full-page photos extend the book to 1,000 pages? Another thought might be to cull the recipes to Favorites, then a second book, More Favorites, then another, then another. That would allow for a variety of recipes per book, rather than splitting everything into single-topic publications — which could vary widely in size, depending upon the number of recipes in each category. @Desie welcome to the forums! Publisher is “daunting,” but you may find that @MikeTO’s Unofficial PDF Manual - Expert Guide to Affinity Publisher will be a great help in getting you through the learning curve. You will find it in the Tutorials section of these forums. Edit: Having downloaded your PDF (I was on iPad when I first commented) I have now had a chance to look at your pages on a larger screen and printed on an 8.5 x 11 page. Personally, I like the size of the pictures and the "air space" around your ingredients. Gives the reader plenty of room to scribble in their own comments. Perhaps you might reduce the name block a little bit, to make more room for the recipe or the picture. For me, the very large size plus bold type for the page number is rather distracting. As an avid customer of cookbooks, I think "Prep time" rather than "Pre time," is more common, but that is just me. To be picky, it is "Corned Beef" on p. 18, and although the cook time for the Cheeseburger Burrito on p. 16 is noted as 2.5 hours (Hockey puck!) the actual recipe clearly states "Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes." You will find that in Publisher, there is a very good Find and Replace Panel, which should help you immeasurably as you proof hundreds of recipes. Final note: I'm off to the grocery store. Crispy Fried Mushrooms here we come!!! Quote 24" iMAC Apple M1 chip, 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, 16 GB unified memory, 1 TB SSD storage, Ventura 13.6.7. Photo, Publisher, Designer 1.10.5, and 2.5.5. MacBook Pro 13" 2020, Apple M1 chip, 16GB unified memory, 256GB SSD storage, Ventura 13.6.7. Publisher, Photo, Designer 1.10.5, and 2.1.1. iPad Pro 12.9 2020 (4th Gen. IOS 16.6.1); Apple pencil. Wired and bluetooth mice and keyboards.
Komatös Posted November 11, 2024 Posted November 11, 2024 I can't give any help here, but I would like to tell you that my mouth was watering when I checked the PDF. 🤤 jmwellborn 1 Quote MAC mini M4 | MacOS Sequoia 15.2 | 16 GB RAM | 256 GB SSD AMD Ryzen 7 5700X | INTEL Arc A770 LE 16 GB | 32 GB DDR4 3200MHz | Windows 11 Pro 24H2 (26100.2605) Affinity Suite V 2.5.7 & Beta 2.6 (latest) Interested in a free (selfhosted) PDF Solution? Have a look at Stirling PDF Ferengi Acquisition Rule No. 49: “A deal is a deal is a deal.”
carl123 Posted November 11, 2024 Posted November 11, 2024 On 11/9/2024 at 2:00 AM, Desie said: Im not unhappy with the format, but am always open to ideas. Cookbooks are all about the food. So, you need to have a decent image of the food you want people to cook. Most of your images are badly cropped and have a yellow rectangle with text on top of them Ideally full page images of the food across facing pages would be best for a cookbook but this would make your book 1000 pages which may be too much At the least, I would go for an image that covers approximately half a page with the recipe (text) below it for all the recipes that can fit on one page. For those recipes that cant then use 2 facing pages for the text and a decent sized image. Hopefully this approach will keep the total pages nearer the 500 mark than the 1000. I have quickly reworked your Crispy Ginger Beef page so you can see what I am talking about. Your original layout is on the left. Quote To save time I am currently using an automated AI to reply to some posts on this forum. If any of "my" posts are wrong or appear to be total b*ll*cks they are the ones generated by the AI. If correct they were probably mine. I apologise for any mistakes made by my AI - I'm sure it will improve with time.
Desie Posted November 15, 2024 Author Posted November 15, 2024 I cant tell if I'm responding to one, or all that were kind enough to offer ideas of improvement. So i'll approach it like Im talking to you all.You are absolutely correct about (prep time versus pre time). I discovered that one about seventy recipes in, the thing about mistakes - you can cut and paste those things forward till the cows home, problem fixed. Same thing with the Cheeseburger Burrito, now fixed. As I have started to build this book I have noticed, two types of recipes. Those I have made time and time again and those I put into a word document with intentions of cooking but have not done so, to date. So, perhaps a book of favorite recipes may be the way to proceed should the project get too large - we'll see. On that note I have completed two chapters, Beef and Fish & Seafood. Ihave a table of contents and am now going to learn how to start adding indexing...yea... Thanks again everybody I really do appreciate all your help jmwellborn 1 Quote
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