02-17-94: Dick Desjardins asked me to work out a convenient way to establish the correct title placement for
the StorageWorks covers, which will have a diecut aperture in the cover, with the title showing through.
Dick says that Al Mayer’s design specs call for the title to be set in 42-point Palatino. At the same time,
however, the design specs provided by the printing department indicate the text is to fit in a space that is
designed to be 2.17” high by 5.33” wide, with the bottom edge being 6.5” from the bottom of the page and the
left edge being 2.25” from the left edge of the page, with the aperture having slightly rounded corners.
The obvious approach should be to create that page (via a template) either as a separate document or as a
separate section, with the Page Setup values adjusted to leave only the actual space available. The writer then
must make his/her title fit within that space—which can be encouraged by supplying a “dummy” text string
with the desired font and font size, with the writer then simply replacing that text with his/her title—which
will be displaced to the next page of the work document if it is too long. The need to include any other text on
the page (such as a repetition of the StorageWorks log at the top and/or the Digital address at the bottom) can
be taken care of simply by preprinting a stock of such pages, to obtain the unchanging information, and then
using the preprinted page when it is time to print a cover.
The cover setup is relatively straightforward. To compensate for the rounded corners, I simply added
0.05” to the applicable measurements, finding that the Page Setup utility will accept some values but round
others off. At the moment, for example, the cover aperture, shown in Section 1 of this file, is set to be 2.4”
below the top of the page, 2.4” from the left edge (2.33” rounded off), 6.55” from the bottom, and 1.0” (0.97”
rounded off) from the right side. This leaves a printable “hole” that measures 2.05” high by 5.1” wide.
As should be patently obvious, however, this space restriction severely limits how much text can be fit
into that space ... which becomes a problem to us, because the engineering minds that create these titles like
Germanic constructions full of semi-informative adjectives.
Since a “point” equals 0.01384 inch, and since WinWord presumably adds a standard 2-point (or more)
gutter spacing between lines, this means that each line of text will consume 44 x 0.01384 = 0.609 inches,
which means that three lines (1.827”) will fit comfortably within the 2.05”-high aperture—but that those lines
will be limited to a length of approximately 30 picas each, meaning that there will not be space for more than
two or three words per line (four if they are fairly short words).
Experimentation indicates that this all changes with different fonts, however. I find that I can get three
lines of Times New Roman at 42 points and four lines at 31 points ... but that Palatino (on my home system)
requires reduction to 41 points (as currently shown here) in order to get three lines, meaning that restricting
the title to 42 points will limit the title to two lines of text, containing between four and eight words!
02-18-94: All of that went out the window with the further clarification that the aperture also had to include a
line under the title, followed by the publication category (User Manual, etc.), followed—with an appreciable
space—by the order number ... with the additional news that the coversheet font was Arial (which is a
TrueType font that gets translated into Helvetica in our print setup, anyway).
So—I’ve incorporated those into the template setup, finding that the title is restricted to two lines for a
total of three or four words at 42 points ... and works down from there.
02-18-94: While I was typing that, it changed again. The semiofficial word currently is that the title will be
24-point Palatino, while the category will be 14-point Helvetica and the order number will be 9-point
Helvetica.
I’ve also set up the second page of this template to print the StorageWorks logo, currently set up at a size
that met Carl Peterson’s approval, which will be preprinted on the sheet used for the title page. For the record,
the preprinted page has to be put in the 4M machine upside down (logo image on bottom), bottom end first
into the paper tray.
