Last night my wife finished her read-through and editing job on the latest draft of my book about the Leica D-Lux 4 camera. She did an outstanding job; she is very meticulous and focuses well on details and maintaining consistency. She found quite a few typos and other issues that either had been missed by other readers and editors or had been introduced during the editing process. I spent today going back through the entire draft in Adobe InDesign and entering the changes she made on the hard copy. This included taking several more photos, all of which were screen shots of the menus in the D-Lux 4 to illustrate discussions of the menu options.

After I got all of the changes entered, I went back and adjusted the page cites in the Table of Contents. Then I re-generated the Index. I didn’t want to try to just adjust the page numbers in the Index; it seemed to be safer (and much easier) just to generate a new index. InDesign has a fairly powerful indexing feature, so I used that to good advantage.

Then it was time to print out another complete draft to see what it looked like. Here was where Murphy’s law seemed to activate and cause a few glitches. First, I tried to print the whole book from within InDesign. As I said in earlier posts, there had been considerable difficulty in finding the right printer driver to do this, but I recently downloaded the new PostScript driver for the Brother HL-4070CDW color laser printer, and I thought that driver would work well. As it turned out, though, the pages only printed on one side of each sheet, despite my setting the driver to do duplex printing. Maybe I had something set wrong, though I couldn’t find any problem in the settings.

So I abandoned that approach and tried exporting the InDesign document to an Adobe PDF file, which worked a week or so ago. I got the PDF file exported at high quality and it started printing nicely, at high quality, and on both sides of the sheets. The problem this time was that the printer ran out of memory — the first time that has happened. So only about 12 or so sheets printed, then the printer stopped.

I quickly checked the printer’s documentation about adding memory, and ordered a 512 MB memory card from Amazon.com for about $68.00 including shipping. It should arrive next Tuesday.

In the meantime, I decreased the quality setting from 2400 dpi to 600 dpi, and the whole document printed out, on both sides of the pages. The problem this time was that the color photographs are too dark. I’m hoping that issue will be cured when the memory card arrives and I can print at higher quality. If not, I’ll have to tweak the print driver settings to see if I can correct that problem. The photos are not too dark; this was just some sort of printing glitch.

Other than that, I’m starting to work a bit on promotion and publicity. One of my guiding principles is that I don’t want to spend a lot of money on promotion and advertising; I’m going to look for inexpensive ways to get out the word about the book.