[khalleron]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I'm probably just being very picky about the page number. (BTW, I didn't intend that it should be centred on all pages, but that looks OK.)

The chapter starts look a lot better, as do the title page and the dedication.

You seem to have applied a grey shadow to the capitals at the start of chapters. This might work if they were a lot larger (& you applied a baseline shift to make sure that the baseline of the black letter matched the rest of the line, rather than the baseline of the grey shadow), but I'm not fond of shadows in books (you may have noticed!).

No applied shadows, that's just how the font is.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

The hyphens that should be en-dashes haven't been fixed. Compare (in close-up) the en-dash in the first paragraph with the hyphens elsewhere.

item – no

slow - she

See the difference?!)

Not sure, but I'll give it a look.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I can see that you're tried to avoid widows and orphans (single lines of paragraphs left on the previous or next pages), but you shouldn't do this by just pushing the lines onto the next page - having the last line on the page be in a different position from page to page looks worse than the occasional widow or orphan. Especially on facing pages, and when the page number is so close to the last possible line. Instead, try minor adjustments to the tracking (spacing between characters) to make a paragraph either take up fewer lines or more lines.

Guess I'll be digging into OO help - I have no idea how to do that at this point.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I don't have any experience in Open Office. I would expect that there's a "Drop Caps" command in there somewhere, perhaps in paragraph attributes.?!)

There is a Drop Caps attribute, but it doesn't include word-wrap, not that I can see anyway. Will dig into Help and see if I can find a solution.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

And, of course, there's the question of what you think it looks better. I'm just someone with a knowledge of typographic terms and practice from a few years writing software for the publishing industry. I have little to no artistic/design talent.

I do think it looks better after your suggestions, except for the widow/orphan control. I'll work on that.

Thanks heaps!

Kate

EDIT: I found a tutorial that explains drop caps, so I'll try that when I get home from work. Tracking, kerning, etc. are apparently not features of OO, so I'll have to find a work-around. I do agree the book looks better when the page lengths are the same. Will have to put my problem-solving hat on, unless anyone has experience with OO and can give me some pointers.

I'm learning as I go along.