Colophon
The following is the colophon from the original book, and of course there are vast differences in the online format, such as using a Lato typeface rather than form of Baskervald, but the underlying history naturally remains the same.
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I was taking notes about cafeteria stories well before word processing was available, and some of it got typed up now and again. After I hit college (specifically, during an October holiday weekend in 1980), I started creating the actual stories and moving various pieces of that material among a whole lot of text editors and word processors (e.g., WordStar, vi, WordPerfect, and so on). Some of it was on FrameMaker for quite a while, starting with Version 2 for Unix on a NeXT around 1989, and ending with Version 5 for Windows 95. Some of that work was registered for copyright as individual stories in the early/mid 1990s. After I finished my dissertation in late 1997, it was more efficient just to use home versions of the ubiquitous programs favored by my employers and schools, moving to various versions of Word (for PC and then for Mac), and finally to Sigil and Calibre (and Adobe Digital Editions when Sigil no longer had a book view on Mavericks, which has since been fixed). Naturally I ran everything through EpubCheck. No doubt I’ll use platform-specific proofers when I go to publish this book, but I probably won’t come back and edit this passage to mention them by name per edition as they’re predictable (e.g., Book Proofer for iTunes, Previewer for Kindle, and so on).
This document is set in BaskervaldADFStd, a GNU licensed version of Baskerville designed and generously made available by the Arkandis Digital Foundry. (Some ePub readers will, sadly, default to other fonts.) Many years ago I used Corel Draw 3 to alter some fonts for various projects, and while I was at it I designed the operator for ‘direct iconic proportion’. The three “meaning as construal” examples were drawn in Illustrator, along with the “blind spot” graphic, then exported as PNG. I also used Illustrator for the title page pinstriping, and to draw the ornamentation for the chapter headers (which reduce to simple characters like ʃʅ in some viewers). IcoMoon converted those exported SVG files into a TTF font, which was converted to OTF online at everythingfonts. (Again, some readers will default to the standard characters.) The scan from my grampa’s letter was dusted off in Photoshop. The cover and author’s bio photo were prepared in Photoshop. All PNG files were losslessly compressed with ImageOptim. I used Illustrator and iQR to produce the QR code below.
Contemporary colophons are strange to me in that one of the most interesting parts is lost, namely the elegant description of the paper on which a book is printed, with all of its information about its color, weight, cotton content, and possibly other sensory aspects like texture.
Oh well.