Every Page a Painting - Walls of Words

Yup, hello, it's me, back on my typesetting binge again, with another "Every Page a Painting" to show you. And boy oh boy, do I have a real treat for you this time around: one of my favorite novels on this site, one that hasn't been typeset before. . . well, until now, of course.

Also, before I start, I want to apologize to RBDash47 for undertaking this one. I know you had your heart set on this one, bud, but as my readers have come to expect, I wait for noöne. I just do it.

(Disclaimer: everything you see here is work in progress and subject to change.)

Introduction

Picture this: two languages colliding with one another, each expressing and reflecting their thoughts so vastly differently from the other that it's all but irreconcilable. When learning the other language, you must change your entire thought process, as our protagonist is forced to do.

With a description like that, which story do you think I'm typesetting?

1. A Voice Among the Strangers by Tystarr.
2. Arrow 18 Mission Logs by AdmiralTigerclaw.
3. The Children of Planet Earth by yours truly.

I'll give you a moment to think it over.

. . . .

You're wrong.

Subjunctive is arguably Integral Archer's masterpiece. Written from 2013--2014, it details a changeling linguist, Errenax, infiltrating Equestria as a vanguard prior to the Canterlot invasion. When that failed, he was cut off from the rest of the hive, forcing him to survive on his own with just his wits and his words.

This story is very much a hidden gem in the fandom, and I'm not saying that just because I'm a linguist myself (though I won't deny that's one reason of many). Language barriers are a surprisingly common trope in this corner of the fanfic scene, but very, very few of them look much deeper than the surface-level "I didn't understand a word you just said!" remarks and really tackle the more fundamental differences---and their consequences.

Subjunctive, however, does go deeper. It's a simple grammatical change: the ponies speak primarily in the indicative mood, which, for those wondering, simply describes the world as the speaker sees it; while the changelings speak primarily in the subjunctive, which mainly describes hypotheticals. Any language is capable of both moods, though speaking exclusively in the latter eventually starts to sound stilted. There's a reason for this; you'll just have to read it to find out.

Like with Origin Story, I haven't contacted the author first before doing this. Unlike with Origin Story, the reason is nobody can get in touch with him. He was last seen on Fimfiction in 2022, and frankly that blip was a miracle.

So Here's the Plan

As much as I want to get this story onto dead trees, I also want to do a critique of Ponyfeather Publishing's practices. I mean, sure, I explained my gripes with them and suggested ways of changing it up, but I've yet to demonstrate my points. Two birds, one stone.

Normally I go with one kind of book and leave it at that, but Dash has demonstrated the viability of having both hardcover (jacketed hardcovers, to be exact) and paperbacks for sale. Just pick which one depending on your budget. For once, I'll be going that route too---but only insofar as to demonstrate a flaw in his workflow. What do I mean? I'll get there.

And just because I'm such a nice guy, I'll also go with their usual octavo trim size.

Let's Get to Work

My main gripe with Ponyfeather is their cookie-cutter interior designs. Pick any two at random and look inside; you'd see what I mean. It's a design that works, granted, but even that will stale over time. Even a blade will wear thin; and then it's time to replace it.

A confession: even though I knew they worked with octavo pages, I didn't take the time to measure their margins. Apparently they use ¾ in. on all sides, with no additional gutter. Instead, to make more efficient use of the page, I'm going with ½ in. on all sides, with an additional ¼ in. of gutter. In other words, exactly the same as Sam & Rose. (Oops.)

But I'm not going with their design. For starters, instead of setting body text with Minion Pro¹ like Ponyfeather, I'm whipping out Arno. You were probably expecting something like Garamond, but for an adventure across Equestria and indeed across language itself, Arno's the better fit. Its handwritten look,² especially when italicized, also lends nicely to its first-person perspective, as if this was actually Errenax's diary.

¹Personally I prefer Minion 3 for its IPA support.

²It wouldn't be a Robert Slimbach original if it didn't start as handwritten glyphs.

Ponyfeather usually likes to use Adobe Garamond for its headers, but there is a more ad-lib element to them, as I've seen other fonts take its place from time to time. Adobe Garamond, however, doesn't use optical sizes, so its body-text-optimized appearances sticks out like a sore thumb as a header font (unlike, say, Garamond Premier). Arno, meanwhile, has optical sizes, and I'll definitely be making use of them---enough, dare I say, to do the entire interior in Arno. Now that'd be something to see!

Just like with Sam & Rose, I'm setting the body with 0p10 text, with 1p0 leading. According to Arno's documentation, this point size recommends that I use the "small text" optical size. I'm happy to have listened to that, because the regular optic just doesn't cut it.

I also respect that Ponyfeather starts a chapter with a supercap and sets the first few words in smallcaps. I changed the supercap into a dropcap (dropping down two lines), but kept the smallcaps lead. The dropcap font is Arno Display Light Italic, with swashes turned on---I actually shocked myself at how good it looked.

As for the interior design itself: if you've ever read from a mass market paperback book (and no, I don't mean The Purloined Pony), you'd notice that they make particularly efficient use of each page: rather than start a chapter on a fresh page, they simply skip a few lines and start there instead. It's all part of their philosophy of minimizing costs: if you're wasting page space, you're wasting cash.

You can already tell where this is going.

To make the most of each page, I'm only sacrificing 2p0 for a header---page number in the corner, author/title centered. These were set in Arno Caption, with smallcap text. I don't have the luxury of inserting chapter titles here, not with its continuous layout. It also means I have to do the entire body in one InDesign document.

Then I set some ground rules:

1. When starting a new chapter, skip two (2) lines and start below the text.
2. Chapter headers take up two (2) lines for the chapter title, plus one (1) line above for the chapter number.
3. After one (1) line skip, two (2) lines are required to start the chapter text, to make room for the dropcap.
4. Under no circumstances should the chapter number/title and its first two lines be divided into separate pages.

That effectively gave me a requirement of 8p0 of space to start a new chapter on the same page. Most pages easily fulfilled this requirement; some did not. That's normal.

Once I was done typesetting, I noticed just how massive a lot of paragraphs were, and more than that, how easy it was to compress them with some forced line breaks to save page space. This forces more words together, but with paragraphs this long, it made minimal difference, other than shrinking the body by about half a dozen pages.

Then, because Ponyfeather likes to include an author's other works, I did the same---but unlike Ponyfeather, which inserts this list at the start of the book, I inserted it in the back, as the last printed page. I'd argue mine makes more sense: if you liked what this author wrote, the list being placed there should entice you with more. If not, well, you were never going to see it anyway.

In the end, the interior file stretches across 191 pages, including the front and back matter. This is a very good number: it means it's optimized for four-, six-, eight-, twelve-, sixteen-, and thirty-two-page signatures.³ That's right, I can print this with literally any signature size I want. As usual, it's one page short of even working to let Ingram and Amazon insert their colophon.

³This unique property is due to the page count being evenly divisible by 96.

Covering It All Up

Ponyfeather has some unique covers in the fandom, despite being sampled from nonfandom books. This is so they'd look somewhat normal when being shelved with other books, while still staying unique and true to My Little Pony. And how unique they are! They're typically commissioned from fandom artists, and they always fit the tome to a T.

I decided to emulate their efforts---but I wanted to get a little creative too. I'm not saying their covers are cookie-cutter identical, not like Ministry of Image's, but even they could stand to think a little outside the box.

To start: this is a story about words, yes? But if all I put on the cover is the title and author, well, that's just dreadfully boring, isn't it? So instead, I went the opposite route: lots and lots of words, all over the cover.

Ideally, it's supposed to resemble an old book, with fragile paper and fading ink. More specifically (mostly because I originally intended to emulate a newspaper's front page but couldn't do it accurately (and believe me, I tried!)), I copied a dictionary page (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, for those wondering) into a new InDesign document, choosing the page that had the word subjunctive. Once I had those down, I filled in as many words as I can think of both forwards and backwards. And the typeface I used? Surprise, it's not Arno! Because it lacks IPA support, I had to look elsewhere. Eventually I stumbled upon Gentium---a remarkably high-quality typeface from SIL International (which just so happens to be the author of the SIL Open Font License!). It provided a nice contrast to Arno: printed vs. handwritten, but with a sparkle in its own right.

Once the page was typeset, I needed a way to make the relevant word stand out to the reader. I eventually settled on a highlight---a smudge paradoxically layered under the text, fading from this color to this color to this color. If those look familiar, yes, they were sampled from Queen Chrysalis's carapace. (You wouldn't be the first to interpret it as changeling blood.)

I then exported the page to a PDF, imported said PDF into my Photoshop front cover panel, enlarged it by 25%, and tilted it 6° counterclockwise to generate some visual interest. Yes, I set up the panel so that it went out to beyond the bleeds. What's nice about PDFs is that they work very similarly to vector graphics, so there's no pixelation no matter how much I enlarge it.

I then did the spine in Gentium too, jacket flaps in Arno, used a paper texture I found online as the background art, and. . . voilà!

The dust jacket, exported at 72 DPI.

The left one, meant for the back of the book, is supposed to be filled in with the author's bio---something I need to get from the author himself. And since he's AWOL, it'll remain Lorem Ipsum'd for the foreseeable future. (Also notice the blank back cover. Remember this.)

So that takes care of the hardcover. The softcover, of course, is going to be very similar to the jacket, though it'll be cut to different dimensions. In particular, the spine is narrower, printed and cut precisely to size. Protip: be careful when calculating the spine width using Lulu; for some reason, they use raw page counts instead of rounding up to the nearest whole signature.

So with that caveat out of the way, let's convert this cover. And for those of you paying attention, this is the part of the blogpost where I point out that flaw I mentioned.

See, Ponyfeather likes to put the blurbs and author bios in the jacket flaps. Fair enough; I do too. The issue is what to do with these texts when converting to paperback. While Dash puts the blurb on the back cover, he also has a habit of putting them inside the book itself, essentially doing two interiors and potentially tacking on another signature. Waste of work, waste of paper.

But I have a better idea: why not put both of them on the back? It'll take some creative typesetting to mesh it with preëxisting cover art, but it's doable if you know what you’re doing.

Take MrNumbers' The Mare Who Once Lived on the Moon (left) and Daetrin's Gods of Old and New. Above are the paperback back covers with the front jacket flap text; below, the rear flap text as the last printed page of each book. (Shoutout to pneu for these photos; I don't have these editions on my shelf.)

Okay, book booty shots aside, that's just what I'm doing with Subjunctive: I'm taking the text from both jacket flaps and slapping it on the otherwise blank back. Call them Plans A and B. It seems like such a minor change, but after this adjustment, I get to use a single common interior for both, which simplifies my workflow. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

The paperback cover, exported at 72 DPI.

Unlike with the jacket, the back uses Gentium to provide a more uniform cover appearance.

Galley Proofs

The title page. I went all out on swashes in the title; I couldn't not do that with Arno.

I made the author line a little more interesting by adding "A Romance of Words by. . . ." 'Romance' has a double meaning here: besides being the essence changelings feed from, it's an older word for a novel.

The table of contents. I already know you're about to throw hands over the Roman numerals---they’re a personal preference; I'm not the first to use them that way.

Start of the first chapter. I forwent the header for this one mostly as an aesthetic choice. Here you can see how marvelous the dropcaps look.

Start of the second chapter. Here you can see how my same-page-start rules work.

To further its simple design, no graphics serve as scene breaks; instead, two lines are skipped to separate them, similar to separating chapters.

Newspaper headlines are centered, bolded, and smallcapped. You'll find something set similarly (but revealing it would be a spoiler).

This novel also has two footnotes. These were typeset manually, using the caption optical size at 0p8 size and 0p9.6 leading.

One of my favorite dropcaps in this book, simply because I enlarged two characters instead of one (and look how well they fit together!).

The very last printed page in the book (excluding colophons, if any). Many of Ponyfeather's authors have long lists of other works; some do not. Links to these stories:

• Órdó ab Chaó
• Aureax Ferrí
• Blank Slate
• PRAT
• "And I Asked Why"

Special Thanks

• RBDash47: the brains behind Ponyfeather Publishing. He had this story lined up for reading, intending to wait to work with the author to do a print, but said author has been AWOL for some time. Thank your for your implicit advice from your work, I hope you've learned something from mine, but other than that, yeah, sorry I had to jump the gun.
• Integral Archer: I mean, he is the author---of course I'd have to credit him somewhere. Thank you for writing this masterpiece on language, and again, I'm sorry you had to find out this way.

---

And that's the lot! Truth be told, I wanted to get these first three out of the way as soon as possible. I may have more typesetting blogs to write in the future, but that depends on whatever projects I take on. For you, though, that just means whatever the next "Every Page a Painting" is will be a complete surprise---even to me!

Good night, and good luck.

Comments

[Themaskedferret]

Late to the party but another excellent entry! I really love the faded look of the cover and that is an excellent use of greens. n_n

Interesting stuff and beautiful font choices as always. I do feel for poor Dash the amount you rag on him tho. ;)

Here's hoping the author returns someday and sees the beautiful things you've crafted.

[Chicago Ted]

5772356

I really love the faded look of the cover and that is an excellent use of greens.

Isn't it? Previous iterations had a simple yellow highlight or a black, red, or blue ballpoint circle the word, but I thought the teal-to-green smear added more character than those (it could've been anyone's circling, after all!).

I do feel for poor Dash the amount you rag on him tho.

Hey, I didn't mean to go that hard on him. I just hope he learns at least to shake up his practices, to get him out of the rut. Stale book template notwithstanding, he is competent at what he does, and I'll be the first to tell you that.

Here's hoping the author returns someday and sees the beautiful things you've crafted.

One can only hope. . . .