Pictures first:

EDIT: As 6343682 and 6344251 kindly pointed out, my edits to the first book were somewhat overzealous. I have since redone the text with the same method I used on the other seven and made it available along with the others, including the edited version of Austraeoh, so that anyone printing the books for themselves has the choice.

Yesterday, I finally, finally caught up with Ofolrodi. It took me a little more than a year, but I made it. When I started reading, I didn't think the story would hold my interest long enough for me to finish, but after completing Innavedr, I knew I had been wrong. So wrong, in fact, that I wanted these books on my shelf.

For each book, I ran a simple spellcheck on it to clear away the most obvious errors and make it a bit more presentable. Eventually, I had to split them into multiple volumes when Lulu, the printing service I used, wouldn't accept books with such a high page count. I designed the covers to be minimalistic, though I acknowledge this may not be for everyone. If you'd like help making your own covers, for these books or others, let me know — I'd be happy to help! I've run into a lot of the common pitfalls making these.

Finally, I contacted Sinrar and got his permission to put his maps in the prints. They're in grayscale, of course, but they're still beautiful. Each covers the book before it, so as not to spoil the current one: Eljunbyro's map covers Austraeoh, and so on.

I also did more with the first book than just spellcheck it: I spent about a hundred hours editing it line by line. As ThePoneDrome made clear, not every edit was beneficial — many of them, I realize now, were uncalled for and pointless, if not making the book worse. But, for all the things I changed that detracted from it, there were a lot more things that I think made it flow a lot more smoothly. While not grammatically incorrect, the amount of one-clause sentences Skirts had in that book was astronomical, and it felt like riding in a car with a student driver at times with how many full stops there were. He had this thing with dialogue tags, too, where he would never use 'said' two times in a row, and that's fine, but he used 'uttered' and other weird tags instead, most of which felt awkward and out of place. And there's also this whole sequence where Rainbow throws Scootaloo's goggles away and never picks them back up, and then they just magically reappear twenty chapters later... My point is that it's far from being all bad.

If you print these yourself, it's up to you which version to use. I've included both in the zip (they both work with the same cover file). If you want to see a complete list of differences, Darkenetor has kindly made such a list available here.

In both the edited and unedited versions, I changed the following, which I sincerely hope won't upset anyone: I italicized Luna's dialogue in her first appearance, ensured Gold Petals was referred to as Gold Plate (rather than Iron or Sun Plate) in the trip to Windthrow, and replaced Red Turnip's speech about the Grand Choke with the one from Rainbow's flashback in Yaerfaerda to preserve continuity.

I've bundled up all the covers and interiors and made them available with Skirts' permission. You can download everything you need from here. Just make an account on Lulu.com, make a casewrap hardcover 6x9 book, and when it asks you for the cover, make sure you switch to the advanced one-piece cover designer and then upload the relevant image. Lulu offers promo codes on the home page when you're logged in, so make sure to use one of those. The best one I've seen is 30% off -- with that, the total price for the books before shipping is just under $200 in the US. If you buy one or all of the books, please post pictures! I'd love to see someone else's results.

Thanks for reading, thanks to Skirts for writing this wonderful series, and thanks to you all for bearing with me as I figured everything out.

6338634
This is amazing.

Wow.

This is awesome. Once I get another paycheck or two will definitely pick up. Thanks.

You sure put in a lot of work. Those look pretty nice.

These are super damn sexy, and I really appreciate you making the files available :D

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaant.

Amazing. $200 for all of those is way better than I imagined.

On another note, when you're impressing upon someone just how long this saga is, don't give them a wordcount, just send theme these pictures.

Thanks for making the files free for us and moreso for your dedication in bringing these high-quality books to life. I hope to one day be able to print my own set.

Holy friggin crap, you are amazing and have my utmost respect. It will be a long time before I get these made but it will be on my to-do list.
*bows deeply*

6338634
Hory shit that's beautiful

I think I might actually cry. $200 is a bargain for this wonderful book series in hardcover. This group of crazy lemurs will remember you for years.

I forgot to comment when I saw this earlier, but these are super sexy and so are you.

(Seriously, you edited all of the first book? Holy shit I love you.)

So
MUCH
WANT!!!

This looks super nice! That would be such a nice collection to have.

*may-or-may-not be foaming at the mouth in excitement*

As soon as I have a shelf to put these books on... My gratitude to you.

Truly something I would love to have in my library.

Wow.

Just wow.

golly gee that sure is cool!

It's not only amazing to have this book in book format and the work you did editing them, but they also look awesome. I've completly want to do them. Awesome job!

6338634
Damn....

Kudos to you, mate. :P

Holy shit I want this

6338857
The first or second image would look nice on the TV Tropes page for Austraeoh.

Hey, great job! Seriously awesome.
I'm especially impressed by how you managed to include the map depending on the book, that's a really nice touch.

Questionable cover design choices aside, what's up with some of these edits? Your "prose cleanup" of Austraeoh is more then some minor spelling and grammar tweaking. Bits of the text are flat out re-written and changed for seemingly no reason.

(For reference, everything highlighted in green was added by 90259025, and everything in red was deleted/changed.)

Some of the edits have some merit, but most of the changes comes off as somebody who doesn't have the foggiest idea of what they're doing at all, and arbitrarily editing stuff at will for personal preference. A simple spelling/grammar check is fine, but when you start rewriting entire paragraphs? Cut out lines? Change up a character's way of speaking? It's too far, personally.

6338634

So. Earlier I had started going through the Austraeoh text to single out 90259025's edits, possibly in the hopes that they could be a useful reference for future works since not everybody holds the same stance about wider reaching edits.
As the other Pone here already mentioned turns out that y'all might want to take a look at what they actually are before using these as base for your 200$ print order. And the work done here would actually tl;dr be:

• The PDFs are set in OpenOffice, which means less than great typesetting. They're not made to "look like books" for a lack of better terms either. Not that there's anything wrong with that. The layout is of course good for print. This was also pointless as a tl;dr item since it's literally the first thing that you see upon opening them, but this might as well be a complete list. Another interesting fact for completition's sake would be that that now this is getting too long too. Sue me.
• Font is SIL Gentium, really nice choice IMO
• The amount of work done here is really huge, especially compared to the average Word/Writer export, but...
• (speaking only for the first book) almost all of it is mostly arbitrary, with very few strictly needed corrections. Nothing really new still, but some of the patterns followed are interesting such as:
• Transition from American to British English, at least for anyways > anyway forms.

☭ Most if not all Rainbow Dash mentions shortened to Rainbow

• Some compound words broken apart, but not consistently I think
• Most laughs, grunts, stuttering and other similar vocalizations removed or replaced with descriptions
• Sequential crowd dialogue lines cut or merged into fewer, inconsistently
• Really short paragraphs almost always moved the the same line as the previous or following one, and at times merged together. Obviously great for paper.
• Very few large lines of dialogue completely rewritten
• Very few paragraphs almost completely removed, one of which being the starting phrase of the chapter Wall (p.106) which I think was deleted by error
• Rewritten or removed phrases containing colorful language such as idiot, crotch, and the aforementioned son of some ballerina
• Back on the topic of errors, there is a lack of indentation in the last paragraph of p.62 and the first one following the picture in p.105
• And finally in the middle of p.216 Gold Petals abruptly pauses mid sentence before asking with a slight frown, after an extra added line break

The diff is available online here.
Green is added by 90259025, red is removed from the original. If you prefer to use a saner tool get the sources here and there. These are offset by hand by adding empty lines and duplicating (rarely whole) paragraphs, should go without saying but just to be sure, don't read, make an ebook out of or print them.

Somewhat unrelated... Before uploading the final diff I tried to run it through a random HTML formatter plugin I had just got for Sublime Text. It didn't like the 3MB file, but that led to the greatest discovery that will surely serve me well for life. The GNOME's System Monitor's search bar's context menu leads to to an onscreen emoji keyboard. Don't do GTK, kids.

6343682

6344251

This is really interesting to see. It's been a little over a year since I made these edits, and looking at them now, I'm at a loss for why almost all of them were made. Rainbow Dash -> Rainbow is strange, and certainly unintended, but beyond that, the destruction of most phrases (son of a ballerina? What was I thinking removing that?) is exactly the opposite of my goal.

I think the repetition of editing so many tiny details gradually frustrated me more and more, until I started axing slight transgressions from formal prose that are genuinely funny. I stand by my edits for the other seven books (that was just a spellchecker and minor formatting updates, nothing major), but Austraeoh's are questionable at best.

So. I'm going to take a little time and redo Austraeoh with the standard process from the future books. Unfortunately, I won't be able to keep some of the nicer, more granular things, but I think it will be better this way. Thank you both for examining the texts and pointing all of this out, the feedback is very much appreciated. I'll post in a few hours or so with the new book 1 text.

6344258
Hey you're fast. And thanks to you for the effort.
Also I don't know if you're generally interested in this stuff outside of Austraeoh, plan to do other work of the sort in the future or maybe might want some help with manpower on this one, but while I'm here here's a shameless link to Djazz's Discord Server of Books, E- and Stuffs if you'd like to come hang out for a while. Talk and projects on topic are admittedly few and far between but cool place nonetheless.

6343682
6344328

Alright, I've reverted Austraeoh back to (almost) default. I edited my original post to clarify what I did and didn't do, as well as tone down the hubris a bit (I might have come across as somewhat boastful).

Again, thank you two for letting me know about the edits. If you or anyone else finds a problem, I'd love to hear about it.

6344522

Hey you're really fast.

Just a couple of things slipped through, the paragraph after the image at the end of Rainbow still lacks indentation, the title on the first page reads ELJUNBYRO, and like the latter now Austraeoh too has something typeset in Time New Roman Bold (can't say what, it's just there with Gentium in the embedded fonts), but otherwise great job.

I'm sorry that my post prompted you to remove the original link though, I really just meant to understand it better and thought that it'd be useful to share what I found. I'd be a shame to not even have the choice now that that work has already been done, so can I be annoying and ask if you'd consider putting it back up too?

(And while I'm at it let me double down on that invite too, should you ever consider using Discord.)

6344647

OMG I didn't change the title page what am I doing

The missing indent under the image was intentional — I was treating it as a line break. If there's specific formatting guidelines for pictures, I'd love to know them, but I'm going to leave it as is for now. The font thing, though — that's really weird. I'll try searching by font in OpenOffice and see what I find.

I'd be happy to take you up on your Discord offer! I'll drop by when I finish updating this. Speaking of which, I'd be glad to put the original Austraeoh file back up. For all the things I changed that detracted from it, there were also a ton of things that I think made it flow a lot more smoothly. While not grammatically incorrect, the amount of one-clause sentences Skirts had in that book was astronomical, and it felt like riding in a car with a student driver at times with how many full stops there were. And he had this thing with dialogue tags where he would never use 'said' two times in a row. That's fine, but he used 'uttered' and other weird tags instead, most of which felt awkward and out of place. There's also this whole sequence where Rainbow throws Scootaloo's goggles away and never picks them back up, and then they just magically reappear twenty chapters later...

My point is that it's not all bad. I'll throw it up with the (hopefully fixed) version and update my original post again.

6338634
Out-freaking-standing. Your books are very impressive, you must be very proud. :)

6353987

Thanks! The whole thing with the edits was more than a little embarrassing, but thankfully it’s over now. It’s really great to see all the books next to one another — it really gives an awesome sense of how long we’ve been flying east.

Can't download the second file link. could that be reuploaded or a different link posted please I want to print out the books..

6521765

Oh, yeah, that's a problem! Thanks for pointing it out. It should work just fine now, and I'm aware of what caused the problem, so it won't happen again. If anything else goes wrong, or you just need my attention, make your comment a reply to one of mine -- I won't get notified otherwise.

I'm happy to hear you want to print the books! I just have a couple things to say, if I could have a few more moments of your time.

First, and more important, I'd read my original and unfortunately textbook-long post carefully. There's some important stuff in there about the differences between the two versions of the first book, and you should know what you're printing. Also be sure you're making casewrap hardcover books on Lulu -- the covers will look catastrophically bad otherwise.

And please post a picture of the finished books if you're able! I'd love to see them on someone else's bookshelf.

Just got it I should be able to attach the photo hopefully. I ended up with the original version of text I believe which is fine. How do you attach images btw?

The symbol is on the back of the book how did you get it to the front?

6536764
Hey, it’s been a week again, sorry! Like I said, if you don’t tag me there’s no telling how long it’ll take for me to check this thread.

You attach images by uploading them somewhere like imgur and then using the photo button in the menu bar above the text field. There’s no way to upload images directly, as FIMFiction doesn’t have its own service, but you shouldn’t have any trouble.

Concerning the covers: it’s critical that you’re doing a casewrap hardcover with the advanced one-piece cover designer. The cover will absolutely not work otherwise. If you’re nervous about what you’re doing, you can always order just one book to test it.

Normally I’d do something like this in a DM, but I figure a few others might read it, and if that keeps even one person from screwing up the covers, it’s worth it. (Again, read my original post carefully!)

Nice