Woohoo, the last corrections have been made, and the books are about to go into print!

I asked my publishers if I could have a look at some of the work that they do, so they took me to the prepress proofing place:

What an awesome feeling to have my photos checked (and prepared for print) by a pro:

They showed me their machines…

…and explained their workflow:

I didn’t understand much, but it sounded both very sophisticated and very reassuring.

BTW, for those of you who are planning on getting the books, even the maps that we are using had to be printed and checked again and again:

…

Then we went to a place where they were doing something utterly mysterious called typesetting:

If you had asked me, I would have guessed that typesetting means that you can just load a DOC or a PDF into a computer and have some software run over it to prepare it for the printing process.

But how wrong I was!

Did you know that every paragraph on every page has to be carefully designed by a professional, so that there will be no “widows and orphans”, not too many hyphens, so that the space between the words and letters will look appealing, so that the text will read nicely?

I didn’t.

Soundtrack: Soprano – “Sale Sud Anthem”