Publisher:
Peachpit PressMany of my author friends in the Seattle have written books for Peachpit
Press, so when David Rogelberg approached
me about writing a Visual QuickStart Guide about Eudora
for Peachpit, I was initially excited. My friends have all said nice things about
working with Peachpit and that can make writing a book a lot more fun. In addition,
I'm a major Eudora fan, and because I've used it so much over the last few years,
I know quite a lot about it as well.
Then I went to my bookshelf and looked at few Visual QuickStart Guides and was scared
out of my skull. You see, I'm not a desktop publisher. I last did serious layout
in 1989 in a very early version of PageMaker, and here Peachpit was wanting me to
write and lay out a book in a graphically intensive style (the Visual QuickStart
Guides use a unique, two-column layout where the outside column contains text, mostly
step-by-step instructions, and the inside column contains screenshots with extensive
captions and callouts). Even worse, their template was in QuarkXPress, a program
I've launched maybe twice in my life. But, I wasn't going to let a little thing like
lack of experience with QuarkXPress stop me, especially when I could beg for help
from friends like David
Blatner, who has written numerous books on Quark for Peachpit. So, I agreed to
do the book under the condition that Peachpit get someone to tweak my attempts at
layout and production.
That was when I realized that the book would have to be a cross-platform book, since
Eudora works equally well on the Mac and under Windows. No problem, I've got a PC
and know how to use it. But, what about screenshots? After talking with my editor
at Peachpit, Nancy Davis,
I decided that I'd flip-flop between the versions for screenshots when they were
basically the same and use specific Mac or Windows screenshots when necessary to
illustrate a point in one of the versions. Although I was a bit worried about this
technique, it worked out well. Sometimes my decisions were made for me because I
discovered that certain types of screenshots were much easier on the Mac or on the
PC. For instance, my screenshot software on the PC, Snag-It Pro, couldn't take a
screenshot of a full hierarchical menu, whereas my Mac software, Snapz Pro, could.
The decisions didn't end there. Eudora comes in two versions, the free Eudora Light
and the commercial Eudora Pro, which has more features. I wanted the book to be useful
for everyone, no matter which version they used, so I ended up writing about four
different programs, the Mac and Windows versions of both Eudora Pro and Eudora Light.
Most of the book applies to all versions, and when necessary I added tags to the
top of pages to indicate when a page applied only to one of the platforms or only
to Eudora Pro.
Although I'd investigated ways of importing the text into QuarkXPress after writing
in Nisus Writer (my word processor of choice),
it became clear immediately that I had to write in Quark. The reason was that I was
writing primarily step-by-step instructions and trying to fit them onto a single
page. That required me to edit very carefully on every page - sometimes I would spend
20 minutes trying to move words around to cause a page to shrink by a single line.
Although I'm generally more of a verbose writer, this experience gave me valuable
experience in learning to edit my own writing to space. The book came out much better
because of it.
Writing in Quark would have been tricky except for the hardware setup I use. I have
a Power Mac 8500 with 80 MB of RAM, which is fast enough to run Quark quite nicely
(it's a pig of a program). More important, I use a pair of 20" color monitors
on my Mac. Normally, I use one monitor to work in the program I'm documenting while
I write on the other monitor. However, in the Quark template that Peachpit gave me,
I couldn't read the text unless I zoomed in to 150%. And, since the layout utilizes
facing pages, I had to scroll back and forth constantly. I solved the problem by
zooming the Quark document windows to cover both monitors, which had the effect of
enabling me to view a single page on each monitor at 150% magnification. This hardware
setup, combined with a little work in OneClick
to fix the problems Quark had with the keyboard (I hate it when a program assigns
what I consider to be incorrect keyboard shortcuts to important functions like Delete
Word).
One of the best parts about doing the layout yourself is that when you get the book
back from the printer, it looks just as you expected. I've had layout surprises (all
negative) with most other books I've done, so this one was a welcome change. It looks
great; it's crammed with tons of great information about Eudora, including hundreds
of little-known tips; and I hope people find it useful. I even find myself using
it to jog my memory about various different aspects of Eudora that I don't use regularly.
If you use Eudora, I strongly encourage you to check out this book. Early reports
from both novice users and long-time Eudora fans indicate that it's extremely helpful,
and that's my goal in writing books.
If you're still not quite sure what's in the book, here's some marketing
information I wrote about it.