A smart source document promises great rewards. Creating smart source documents takes discipline. The trick is to separate the document’s content from its presentation. We accomplish this by introducing styles, such as Heading 1, Body Text, and List Number. Styles separate content and presentation like so:

For example:

When you create a new paragraph, tag it with a style. In this case, we used Heading 1. The Heading 1 style, in turn, describes how all such paragraphs should appear. If you set the Heading 1 style to use the Bold, Arial Narrow font, all Heading 1 paragraphs in your document will be rendered using Bold, Arial Narrow. Without styles, changing the Heading 1 font from Arial Narrow to Times could involve selecting and changing every single heading paragraph by hand. Ugh!

The benefits of styles go well beyond rapidly changing fonts. You can also:

How? Styles give your content intelligence. When creating the full-featured PDF, Heading 1 paragraphs also become level-1 bookmarks. When creating the HTML edition, Heading 1 paragraphs are appropriately tagged <h1>. Styles give your content meaning, so downstream filters can interpret it properly.

When you create a new document in Word, you inherit a collection of styles from the document’s template. If you did not specify a template, the normal.dot template is used as your document’s template. How do you access these styles?

In Word 2002, select Format → Styles and Formatting . . . , and a task pane opens on the right. If the list of styles looks too short, go to the bottom of this pane and set Show: All Styles to show everything. The list should grow to include dozens of paragraph, character, list, and table styles. At the top, as shown in Figure 3-1, it shows the style of your current selection. Change your current selection’s style by simply clicking one of the alternative styles in the list.

Figure 3-1. Quickly changing styles using the Styles and Formatting task pane

In Word 2000 or Word:Mac, select Format → Style to open a dialog that shows a list of available paragraph and character styles. Set List: All Styles to see everything. You can also use this dialog, shown in Figure 3-2, to change the current selection’s style. After you change a style, the dialog closes. This is a cumbersome way to apply styles.

Figure 3-2. Changing a paragraph’s style using the Style dialog

A better way to view and change paragraph styles in Word 2000 and Word:Mac is with the Style Area, shown in Figure 3-3. In Word 2000, select Tools → Options → View. In Word:Mac, select Word → Preferences and select the View option. Set the Style Area Width, near the bottom of the dialog box, to 1" and click OK. Now, select View → Normal or View → Outline, and a column on the left will show you the style of each paragraph. Double-click a style name and the Style dialog box opens, enabling you to change the paragraph’s style.

Writing a document using only styles takes discipline. Word makes it very easy to apply paragraph formatting outside of styles, so reduce temptation by closing the Formatting toolbar (View → Toolbars → Formatting), which is shown in Figure 3-4. After closing the Formatting toolbar, you can easily open the Style dialog by pressing Ctrl-Shift-S (Windows) or Command-Shift-S (Mac).

In most cases, you should change a paragraph’s formatting by changing its style (e.g., from Normal to List Bullet) or by modifying the style’s formatting (e.g., adding an indent to all Normal paragraphs). You can modify a style’s formatting with the Modify Style dialog, which you can access in many ways.

From the Styles and Formatting task pane, available in Word XP and 2003 and shown in Figure 3-5, you can open the Modify Style dialog by selecting Modify . . . from the current style’s drop-down menu. Or, in any version of Word, select the paragraph, open the Style dialog by pressing Ctrl-Shift-S (Windows) or Command-Shift-S (Mac), and then click Modify . . . . When using the Style Area, you can open the Style dialog by double-clicking the paragraph’s style name. Then click Modify . . . to open the Modify Style dialog.

Figure 3-3. Changing styles using the Style Area

Figure 3-4. The Formatting toolbar: a dangerous temptation

Figure 3-5. Word 2002’s Styles and Formatting task pane, which provides easy access to a style’s format settings

Finally, avoid using tabs, repeated spaces, or repeated carriage returns (empty paragraphs) to format your content. Instead, update the style’s paragraph indents and spacing to suit your taste. Use tables for tabular data.

To create an automatic table of contents from your document’s Heading styles, select Insert → Reference → Index and Tables . . . → Table of Contents (Word 2002), or Insert → Index and Tables . . . → Table of Contents (Word 2000/Word:Mac).

Once you have spotted a font you want to use, identifying it can be tricky. If you found it in a book, check the back of the book for a colophon. If you found it in a PDF, check its font properties (File → Document Properties . . . → Fonts).

An online, intelligent assistant can help identify your font (it is also a fun way to browse fonts):

Or, try the optical font recognition engine at:

Thousands of professional fonts are on the market, so it might be impossible to precisely identify your font sample. Or, if you do identify your font, it might turn out to be too expensive for your budget. In these cases, you often can discover a good substitute. Later, we discuss some convenient and economical sources for fonts.

To install fonts on Windows, open C:WindowsFonts or C:WINNTFonts in the File Explorer. Select File → Install New Font . . . and a dialog opens. Navigate over to the folder where your new fonts are, and their names should appear in the List of Fonts. Select the fonts you want to install and click OK.

Installing Type 1 or OpenType fonts on older Windows systems (NT, 98, or 95) or older Macintosh systems (pre-OS X) requires that you install one of Adobe’s ATM products first. ATM Light is freely available from http://www.adobe.com/products/atmlight/main.html.

The Internet seems awash with free or cheap fonts. Crafting a good font takes hard work, and a bad font can actually create production problems. I advocate using professional fonts from reputable designers and foundries. Consider buying a font pack to bootstrap your font collection economically.

One source for good, free fonts is the Base 35 font package that comes with Ghostscript [Hack #39] . If you installed Ghostscript to C:gsgs8.14, these fonts will be unpacked to C:gsfonts. Another free, professional font family is Bitstream’s Vera (http://www.bitstream.com/categories/products/fonts/vera/).

Microsoft made its core TrueType fonts freely distributable. If you don’t have them already, you can fetch them from http://corefonts.sf.net.

Computer systems come with dozens of useful fonts. However, some might have licensing restrictions that could prevent you from embedding them into your PDF. When you create your PDF and try to embed such a font, Distiller will report the error in its log file. The resulting PDF might use a poor substitute font instead, such as Courier.

Some authoring products come with fonts. For example, my Adobe Illustrator 9.0.1 CD has 213 fonts located in its Fonts & ATMFonts directory. Even though I asked the Illustrator installer to install fonts, it overlooked these. This same disc includes other goodies, such as clip art and stock photos.

Discover font files on your hard drives and CDs by searching for *.ttf (TrueType or OpenType), *.pfa, *.pfb (Adobe Type 1), or *.otf (OpenType) font files.

The different type foundries offer bulk discounts when you purchase collections of fonts. For example, Adobe offers the Type Basics collection of 65 fonts for $99 (http://www.adobe.com/type/). Visit http://fonts.com and http://www.myfonts.com to learn about the various font packs and CDs on the market.

Here are some suggestions for formatting your document’s text and pages. There are no hard-and-fast rules for good design, so apply these tips judiciously.

Figure 3-6. One serif family (left) and one sans-serif family (right)

Figure 3-7. Activating automatic kerning to make text look better

Figure 3-8. Line spacing measured from baseline to baseline

Figure 3-9. Narrow columns left-aligned (left) and justified (right)

Figure 3-10. All-caps or small-caps fonts, which provide good-looking, all-caps styles

Placing URLs in a paragraph can leave you with awkward line lengths. Microsoft Word won’t break a URL over two lines, so the preceding line can end up looking too short. Here are some ideas for improving URL formatting.

Select and copy your table data. In Word, select Insert → Picture → Chart and a little spreadsheet opens. The first row and first column of this Datasheet are reserved for your data’s row and column headings. Select the upper-left cell and paste your table’s data. The chart will change to reflect your data. Activate/deactivate rows and columns by double-clicking the Datasheet’s row and column labels.

When you first create a chart, Word enters a special state called Microsoft Graph. Exit this state by clicking the document page outside the chart. Re-enter this state by double-clicking the chart. Within this state, you can update the chart’s Datasheet, change the chart type (Chart → Chart Type . . . ), or tailor the chart’s styling (to change a chart component’s color or style, double-click it). You can also resize or scale the chart by clicking its borders and dragging them around.

WordPerfect’s charts behave much like Word’s. In WordPerfect, you can select a table’s data, right-click, and choose Chart to rapidly create a chart. WP’s chart gallery (right-click and choose Gallery . . . ) offers dozens of chart types (as does Word’s). I find WP’s charts the easiest to style.

Sun’s word processor includes chart features that resemble those in Microsoft Word. Select Insert → Object → Chart . . . to start its wizard. Select your table’s data (step 1), select the chart type (steps 2 and 3), set the title (step 4), and you’re done. Double-click the chart to enter a special chart-editing state.

You can also create standalone plots using gnuplot. Easily create basic 2D or 3D plots from input data, or program gnuplot to precisely style the output. Preview plots on-screen, and then render them as PostScript, PNG, or one of the many other supported formats. Visit http://www.gnuplot.info for downloads, documentation, and examples. gnuplot is free software.

Store your two-dimensional data points in a text file like so (from DEMO/1.DAT):

-20.000000 -3.041676
-19.000000 -3.036427
-18.000000 -3.030596
...

Store your three-dimensional data points in a text file like so (from DEMO/GLASS.DAT):

0.568000 0.000000 -0.911000
0.518894 0.231026 -0.911000
0.380066 0.422106 -0.911000
...

Launch gnuplot and an interactive shell opens. By default, gnuplot renders plots on-screen. View a basic 2D plot of DEMO/1.DAT like so:

gnuplot> plot 'DEMO/1.DAT'

View a basic 3D plot of DEMO/GLASS.DAT like so:

gnuplot> splot 'DEMO/GLASS.DAT'

Create a PostScript file from your plot like so (the second set output releases the output file handle):

gnuplot> set term postscript enhanced color solid
gnuplot> set output 'DEMO/1.ps'
gnuplot> plot 'DEMO/1.DAT'
gnuplot> set output

Run one of the DEMO scripts that come with the Windows distribution like so:

gnuplot> cd 'DEMO'
gnuplot> load 'WORLD.DEM'

gnuplot has a good interactive help system. To learn about a keyword, type help keyword (e.g., help term). The gnuplot newsgroup, comp.graphics.apps.gnuplot, can also help you.

A graph illustrates relationships between nodes by connecting them with edges. A directed graph uses one-way edges, indicated by arrowheads. An undirected graph does not. Use directed graphs to illustrate hierarchies or workflows.

Graphviz is a set of open source tools for creating graphs from input data. Visit http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/ for documentation, downloads, and examples.

The Graphviz program we’ll use is called dot. Here is a basic example taken from the dot user’s manual. Label nodes and describe their relationships using a text file:

// example_graph.dot
digraph G {
    main -> parse;
    main -> execute;
    main -> init;
    main -> cleanup;
    parse -> execute;
    execute -> make_string;
    execute -> printf;
    init -> make_string;
    main -> printf;
    execute -> compare;
}

Pass this text file to dot and specify an output file format. We use PostScript, but you can also use PNG, SVG, or one of more than two dozen other formats:

dot -Tps example_graph.dot -o example_graph.ps

The results in Figure 3-11 look good and make sense.

Figure 3-11. Graphviz illustrating hierarchies nicely

Graphviz can also create elaborate, colorful graphs. Visit the Graphviz web site to see some examples.

If self-publishing your book sounds like too much trouble, consider using a service provider that will publish your book for a fee. View a list of providers at https://www.lightningsource.com/ResourcesLinks.htm#AuthorServicesLinks. They offer various programs and à la carte features.

One example is the iUniverse Select program (http://www.iuniverse.com). For $459, iUniverse takes your electronic document and creates two editions: the POD paperback edition and the PDF e-book edition. iUniverse registers ISBNs, creates cover graphics, and lists your book with Amazon and Barnes & Noble. iUniverse pays you a 20% royalty on the money it receives (as opposed to the retail price) minus book shipping and handling charges.

Given this royalty formula, it is impossible to know how much you might receive for each book sold. Let’s make some guesses. If iUniverse gives your book a $25 suggested retail price, a sale through Amazon might pay iUniverse 50% ($12.50). Let’s guess that shipping and handling costs $1.50, which leaves $11. From that, you receive 20%, or $2.20. As I say, this is just a guess. For a broader discussion of royalty voodoo, visit http://www.booksandtales.com/pod/rword.htm.

Consult the newsgroups (http://groups.google.com) for opinions and testimonials on these various services. Perform an advanced search on Amazon to locate books by publisher, and check out their best-selling books.

Tasteful use of specialty or colored papers can improve your document’s appeal and make it stand out. However, different types of paper are used for different purposes. Bond paper generally is used in office copiers. Book paper is formulated for offset printing. If you want to use a special paper, ask a professional printer for advice. Naturally, a copy shop will stock only the papers they can use on-site.

A paper’s thickness, or weight , is measured differently for different types of paper. So, a 20-pound bond paper is not comparable to a 20-pound book paper. An introduction to paper choices is available online at http://depts.washington.edu/bsc/general_PDF's/Choosing_Paper.pdf.

Photographs are difficult to reproduce using a common copier. When detail or color is important, consider grouping this artwork together onto a few, select pages. Use the more expensive color laser printing or color copying on just those few pages, and then insert these color pages into your document before binding.

A staple or paperclip might serve to hold your document together, but a proper spine and covers dress up your work. And, they make your document easier to navigate. Some binding mechanisms, such as a plastic comb, allow your pages to lie flat. Other techniques, such as glue binding, do not.

If your finished document won’t be lying flat, consider using your word processor to add gutters to your document pages. Gutters keep your page text from getting lost in the spine’s fold. In Word, select File → Page Setup . . . → Margins and increase the Gutter setting as needed.

Common topics are pretty well buttoned up by hundreds of popular books. A new book on Photoshop must compete with the 800 other books about Photoshop currently available. Consider aiming at a niche market instead. For example, an Amazon search suggests that only a handful of books are dedicated to scripting Photoshop. A shopper who wants to read about scripting Photoshop certainly would investigate these conspicuous titles.

As a professional, you probably have a specialty. It makes sense to highlight your specialty using a specialized, niche publication. It will be easier to write, and it will enjoy a distinctive profile in the market.

Write about an emerging technology or trend. Or, write about a recent event. Such publications might look more like reports than books, but shoppers will appreciate your timeliness. A related service has sprung up at http://www.LJBook.com. It creates a printable PDF from your LiveJournal blog.

If you are a consultant, publish a book that discusses the most common problems you encounter in your field. Think of it as a consumer-grade product that complements your high-caliber practice. Your status as a consultant will fuel book sales and your status as an author will fuel your practice. For example, the folks at http://www.irwebreport.com use a combination of gratis online articles, for-fee reports, and consulting services to advance their industry profile.

If seminars are your specialty, publish a book to sell to your students, fans, and peers. Selling a tangible book will complement your intangible seminar product.

In short, publish a book as part of your larger strategy to sell yourself. Sell yourself by participating in and contributing to your community.