So how many of you checked your Dec. statement from Amazon?

[Patricia]

I was shocked. I thought I had the royalties all figured out when I looked at the numbers before they were put in that nice, neat spread sheet that went up today. But my figuring was off by hundreds of dollars. It still boggles my brain that my boy Bezos was able to come up with a way for me to finally see some money for my efforts. I figure the reason I expected so much less is that some numbers that I thought represented freebies actually represented sales. I don't generally like surprises, but this time I do.

[Katie]

I earned more in December than I did in the whole 8 months beforehand, so that was nice. I'm hanging out for the January report, as instead of showing me having given away 745 books in the US, they're saying I sold 715 at 3c each and gave away 30, but then the tally only comes to half of 715 x 3c. All very strange, but I'm hoping they'll sort it out by the time they do the report.

Finally looking forward to a cheque (check).

[Patricia]

So if your amount confuses you and my amount confuses me, could it be there's a big fat screw up in accounting at Amazon? Or is their accounting as mysterious as their book rankings?

[K.A.]

I'm looking at a staggering (to me) amount of money from them. This month isn't shabby either.

I can only hope this is a trend for all of us.

I need to get back to work on 'Tempest' the formatting is a train-wreck. I'm so disappointed in Scrivener.

[Patricia]

Oh no. Disappointed? I haven't done the tutorial yet, so haven't done much with Scrivener, but I copy/pasted something into their program, saved it, then copy/pasted it back into Word and the formatting was just right for a Kindle upload.

I've had over a thousand downloads of my latest short story (it went free two and a half days ago). That's way better than the first short story did. I'm not seeing any significant reason to do the freebie for fewer than five days straight this time. But I think the first one would have done better if I spread those freebie days out. This is all a roll of the dice or like trying to time the market.

My titles with a price tag have been inactive for about two days -- no buys, no borrows.

[K.A.]

I didn't get Scrivener set up right. I'm still working on it. But for a fast print out - compiling didn't work. I had to reformat by hand.

I still think it's a terrific organizer. I'm just not so sure about using it for a final print out.

[Patricia]

Why do you print out? Or do you mean your final file?

I fiddled with Photoshop tonight and I'm ready to throw it in the nearest Dumpster. I am way too stupid for that program.

[K.A.]

Photoshop isn't intuitive - but you can do amazing things with it.

I print a copy every couple of months so I can find the typos and other dumb errors that I can't see on a screen. I didn't set up the compile program correctly for what I was doing.

added late: I didn't know I had to set up page size and margins. So my pages are different margin widths.

[Andre Jute]

I don't understand why people use Photoshop at all, except specialists, who can recover the time spent learning it. Adobe's Illustrator is a far more useful programme, and in fact the cheap programme Graphic Converter will do everything Photoshop does, and more, and more conveniently and comprehensibly. I do know what I'm doing in Photoshop, of course, but I use Graphic Converter all the time for almost everything I want to do with images; it's auto-colour balance and scaling facilities are particularly useful. No proper designer would ever dream of using Photoshop for any of the many things amateurs try to make it do. And Photoshop is slow: by the time it has opened, I've usually done the entire job in Graphic Converter and am moving on to the next task already. You can't beat simplicity and efficiency, especially at such a low cost.

[K.A.]

Apple users...brag, brag, brag...

[Patricia]

I just want to get the fonts out of Photoshop, hoping they'll be an improvement over what I have -- but every photo I've attempted to add fonts to was a failed experiment. The fonts in my other two programs are fuzzy and unprofessional-looking. This looks like a program I won't be using.

[Andre Jute]

Profesional fonts are drawn by vectors, algorithms describing curves that scale. Photoshop works by counting pixels, which do not scale. I bet your other programs are also pixel-based. Of course fonts that you made with a pixel based program will look like shit at any size except the precise size, right down to a single pixel, at which you put them on the page -- which you cannot guarantee even if *you* remember not to change anything, because even your screen betrays you: there isn't precisely 72 points to the American inch, as there are pixels, but because the typographer's inch is not an American inch but related to the French Royal inch or pouce* -- and from there it just gets worse with a list as long as a your donkey's-- er-- leg of points (heh-heh) out of your control where your fonts will change size if they're pixel-based. (See, vector fonts are never a picture until they get to the actually printer, including "printing" to a screen. They are transferred in vector math to the very last moment, so they're immune to all the in-between dangers.)

*They didn't even stick to the French Royal Inch precisely, in which 1/72 should be 0.375 971 510 4 mm but rounded it up to 0.376 000 000 0 mm, which is already 0.0076% too big, and that's not an English or an American inch yet, that's still in the French system at the time of Didot, who was just making Fournier's earlier approximate system more precise, and then being undermined by all and sundry.

Skipping a lot of really interesting politics, and even typesetters knifing each other, in 1886 American printers decided to standardize these matters and, being Americans, screwed it up royally (heh-heh). Not only didn't they get the type to agree to the odd American inch, or the British one. Instead, out of respect for the descendants of Ben Franklin, who'd bought his type from Fournier (remember him? the guy who measured carelessly?), they chose the Johnson Pica, in which 83 picas are equal to 35cm. (A pica, you will remember, is one sixth of an inch -- somebody's inch -- and a point is one twelfth of that nominal inch, so 72 point to the inch, if only we can agree on the inch!)

If you don't have a splitting migraine already, Xerox PARC was full of electronics engineers and programmers who did amazingly well for not knowing much about typography. They accordingly restored Fournier's method, including the rounding, so that:

1 pica = 1/ 6 inch (British/American inch of today) = 4.233 mm.
1 point = 1/ 12 pica = 1⁄72 inch = 127⁄360 mm = 0.3527 mm

(Notice that they measure one centimetre longer in every 35 than the Johnson Pica...)

In 1973 the French got back into the act, with the predictable ultra-rational result that yet another standard was created, the EU-sanctioned didot of precisely 0.375 (= 3/8) mm.

Mind that you choose fonts that work with each other, your screen, your printer, and all the idiots along the way...

BTW, there's a reason the most knowledgeable designers like working on screens with 76dpi rather than 72dpi, and it has to do with this scaling.

You can see why Apple used to pay me a consulting retainer NOT to say in public that "there are lies, there are damned lies, and then there is Apple WYSIWYG."

Now that everyone reads on screen, these matters are much less fraught.

BTW, there is also the International inch (1959) which is 999998/1000000 of a US Survey inch.

Personally, I like the Jute Transparent System in which the typographer's point is exactly 0.013837 inch = 0.3514598 mm -- it looks superb on screen because that's a standard Chinese one-on-one desktop pixel -- but the length of the inch is undeclared so that it works perfectly as long as you buy ALL your fonts, computers, printers etc from me. (We call that the Bezos Business Plan.)

[Patricia]

And after all that, I still don't know how to find fonts that'll be better than what I already have.

[Andre Jute]

You get good fonts with Word, with Photoshop, on the net free (be careful, don't accept bitmap fonts, only vector fonts will do, and most of those that are free are crap), from Adobe and others for reasonable prices to outrageous to extortion (my Envirex font, illuminated caps, is sold per character; if you have to ask...) The problem isn't getting good fonts, it is not doing something silly with them, like using them in Photoshop and then scaling the picture with the fonts on it. Too many people mistake ownership of software for knowledge and skill.

Palatino, for instance, given away free with Macs for a generation, is so common that all the wannabes trying to sound like they know something sneer at it, but it is a beautiful, beautiful font both at reading and display sizes.

[Patricia]

How can I move fonts from Word to a photo? I don't understand how one can use fonts from outside a photo program within the photo editing program that has nothing to do with those fonts.

[Andre Jute]

Fonts are independent of applications. They're just automatically installed for you because the people who wrote the application know most of their customers are not very knowledgeable.

Whether you can easily get at the fonts that come free with applications depends which operating system your computer uses. If you have a Mac, the system already has plenty of high quality fonts that Apple gives you. Photoshop just writes its fonts, that Adobe give you, into the fonts section in one of the libraries. (The difference between the libraries is who can access them to use the fonts. But since you're the only person who uses your computer, you don't care.) Microsoft makes it difficult for you to get at its fonts and use them with other apps but it isn't impossible. (Microsoft paid for those fonts... So did Apple, but Apple is very relaxed about what you use their fonts with, because they're not worried about losing customers to Windows.)

If you use another OS, check the manual under "installing Fonts". The process for taking out fonts is the same thing in reverse.

I keep telling you. You shouldn't use Photoshop for font manipulation. It is an invitation to disaster. Learn to use Word's layout capabilities (don't look at me, I use QuarkXPress and do the job right) or get a free page layout program off the net or, best of all, see if you can get a freeclone of Illustrator, because all you want to make is a one page document for the cover. Illustrator is a VECTOR program in which the font stays scalable. It's the sister programme to Photoshop that people should buy instead of Photoshop, but people buy Photoshop because all the other people have already bought it (and gone wrong with it).

[K.A.]

Gimp2 is free.

http://download.cnet.com/GIMP/3000-21...

[K.A.]

I bought the latest version of Print Shop - which is 'Print Master.' It is simple to use compared to Photoshop - and comes with instructions. I think you can print them out.

I like it. I use the 'flyer' function for Mom's book covers. The fonts appear to scale correctly and it was cheap.

It is slower than Christmas to load - but I can live with that.

[Patricia]

My writing partner told me to get Gimp but when I was downloading it, I got all manner of other programs throwing ads at me. I tried to stop the download and couldn't, so I turned off my computer to make it stop. It was insisting on loading a tool bar I didn't want. I have an old version of Print Shop. That's the one that gives me fuzzy fonts. I didn't get Print Master, but did get the latest Print Shop and marched it right back to Best Buy because it doesn't work on a 64-bit computer. To get them to allow the return, I had to buy something else which is what led me to Photoshop.

Andre's posts make no sense to me. I have no idea how to get the fonts already on my computer and my photos together. I think I'm stuck with fuzzy fonts.

[K.A.]

If you have Power Point you can paste the pictures to it - then paste the text over that.

Or you can try it with Word itself. Just look at Word and change fonts, you will see the different fonts, because they are all part of Word.

[Andre Jute]

GIMP is just another pixel-level image manipulator, a free clones of Photoshop. The moment you scale an image with type you made in it, it will rasterize and fuzz up. You can't do good typography in pixel-based programmes. I keep saying this and you keep demanding that I tell you how to do the impossible.

1. Your problem is simple. You want to take a prepared photo and lay text over it in such a manner that the text doesn't become fuzzy. There is no way to do this in Photoshop, GIMP or whatever pixel-based programme. None. Period.

2. You need to understand that the image, the photo, is made up of pixels, while the text exists only as notional mathematically described lines. The moment you flatten the two together, you make the text pixels too, and the slightest manipulation will make the text fuzzy. Therefore you must preserve the text as algorithms (math, vectors, lines) unit you print with it.

3. The solution is to use separate programmes for image manipulation and fitting the image and text together. The programme for fitting text with images that done become fuzzy is called a page layout programme. Here are some free ones that I found in a ten-second search. http://www.google.com/search?client=s...

4. MSWord includes a page layout programme. I have no idea whether it works or how to use it, and no intention of investing any time in it, but you could read the manual.

[S.M.]

K. A. wrote: "Gimp2 is free.

http://download.cnet.com/GIMP/3000-21..."

I've used Gimp2 (on a PC) for several covers. There's a great tutorial on the web that includes a downloadable book cover template. The tutorial teaches you the basics - I toggled between the tutorial and Gimp the first time through - and now that I've played with it, I can do a lot.

I made covers for My Fifteen Minutes, 18 Dead, Out of the Dungeon, and the serial on my blog, A Year of Sundays. You can see them here on Goodreads, or at http://smjbookteasers.blogspot.com

I'm not a graphically minded person, so any of the programs are a learning curve for me - only thing with Gimp is to remember to save a "gimp" copy so you can go back and edit layers. I always forget to do that, and have to start over from scratch to change anything, which makes me crazy. Also - Gimp exports PNG files, which are huge. I end up opening the covers in MS Paint in order to save as jpg files.

[S.M.]

Oh - and as far as adding text - Title and author, etc - I do all of my image manipulating with Microsoft Office Picture Manager - cropping, colors, whatever. Then I open the image with Gimp and create the cover. The very last thing I do is add the title and author info - using whatever fonts are available in Gimp. I haven't noticed any fuzziness. I tried copy/pasting Word Art onto photos using Paint, but the output was terribly pixelated.

So go look at the above covers - if they're of acceptable quality to you, try Gimp. I did spend many hours learning the program - probably 3 hours creating step-by-step using the tutorial as a guide - but it was worth it. I'm really happy with my covers.

[Andre Jute]

Well, if you're happy, SM, that's good enough. You won't be able to use the cover at any other size without remaking from scratch, but if you've saved the GIMP layers, that shouldn't be too much of an effort.

But what sort of fine control over text do you get? This whole saga started when i suggested to Sierra that she set several lines of cover text to the same width and she admitted she can't do it in Photoshop...

[Patricia]

I deleted Photoshop from my computer today. It was just sitting there, taunting me.

Kat, I don't know if I have Power Point. If I do, it was included in some other program and I've never used it.

[S.M.]

Andre, I honestly don't quite understand the question, so I have no idea about fine control. I mess around with it until I like what I see.

[Andre Jute]

Display faces are commonly kerned, meaning to move them closer together than the default inter-letter spacing to achieve a better perceptual fit between nesting characters. Leading alters the default linespacing to move lines of text closer or further apart for a better appearance. In addition, horizontal and vertical scaling of display faces is used to turn text into graphic elements that contribute more than the textual meaning to the cover. All of these, and more, are fine controls to the text just dumped on the page at the default settings.

[Andre Jute]

Patricia wrote: "I deleted Photoshop from my computer today. It was just sitting there, taunting me."

Now that's too far the other way. You still need an app to prepare images by cropping, scaling, changes in resolution, colour balancing, at a minimum, often by removal of the artefacts left by these operations, and sometimes by retouching or gross manipulation (turning a photo sepia, say).

Photoshop wasn't taunting you. You asked it to do what it was not designed to do, what by its very nature it is incapable of doing. It's probably feeling very sorry for itself in the tras$$$h...

[Patricia]

I have a simple photo program that lets me crop, make changes to balance and color, fix wayward white dots, etc., it's just that I'm unhappy with the fonts and see no way to bring other fonts into it. Everything else about it suits me fine. I have another program that lets me make images fatter and taller, or go the other way (thinner and shorter).

Photoshop can feel as sorry as it wishes for itself. I'm not going to dig it out of the tras$$h and give it a home in my computer.

[Andre Jute]

Once more, Sierra:

1. You make image adjustments in a pixel based program, like Photoshop and the program you like.

2. You do NOT lay on fonts in pixel programs unless you like fuzzy fonts.

3. You DO combine images and fonts -- all the fonts in your computer -- in a PAGE LAYOUT program like QuarkXPress or InDesign or their free clones, of which I published a list yesterday. Such PAGE LAYOUT programs preserve the crispness of fonts right through to the printing pocess, including screen printing.

[Patricia]

I'm sorry, Andre, but I have no idea what you're talking about. Even the caps don't help. Are you thinking that I add fonts, then I adjust the picture? I don't do that.

[Andre Jute]

I give up. I can't make it any simpler.

[Patricia]

You could. You could come to my house and do my covers for me.

[Andre Jute]

Be cheaper for you to learn to do it right.

[Patricia]

You have no idea who you're talking to. When my mind decides to shut, it shuts. Math and technology are not allowed inside my brain.