Lay-Flat Bookbinding Build Diary



Introduction
Content
Printing
Clamping
Gluing
The Cover
Gluing the Cover
Things to try


Links

Cornell notetaking system

Japanese five-point binding

Perfect binding

LaTeX

Texniccenter Latex IDE

GIMP Image program

Barcode Generator

 Materials

 Notebook TEX

Notebook PDF

GIMP Book Cover File

PDF Book Cover File



And of course, take a look at builddiary.net the page for all things excessive-hobby related.




Step 5 - Creating the cover

While I was waiting, I started to make the cover. I decided on a thin cardboard that O'Reilly uses for their covers. They have a laminate only on the outside of the cardboard, so it does not interfere with the adhesion of the glue on the inside.

As a tribute to O'Reilly, I decided to use a similar cover style, right down to the woodcut animal on the front. O'Reilly gets their woodcuts from Dover Publications, and they seem to have an excellent selection of very nice books. However, I like to do things the hard way. I chose a Chickadee, and decided to use the free GIMP program to create the cover. Doing a woodcut turned out to me much harder then I thought, but after several false starts, I found several good tools and techniques that worked for me. Some were even adapted from Photoshop techniques that were documented online. Here's how you do it:

Create the woodcut animal:
  1. Find a nice picture of the animal you would like on the front cover. You want to find something with a high resolution if possible.
  2. Open the file in GIMP, and create a new layer from the background.
  3. Delete the background, and make it a grayscale picture.
  4. Select each area that will be will get the woodcut effect, trying to follow the planes of the pictures. Cutting along black/white boundries is good, too.
  5. Copy and paste the selected area to a new layer, making sure it is aligned with the background layer.
  6. Use the newspaper filter on the selection. I used line mode and a cell size of 9. Change the angle to match the flow of the selected area.
  7. iWarp the selection by using Move and Grow to force curves into the lines. beware you don't shrink the borders so there will be gaps between the selections. This part took a lot of experimentation.
Repeat the 4-7 until you have converted the entire picture. Merge the layers (except for the background layer) and do some finishing work blending the edges. Do a final Gaussian Blur at setting 2 for the entire animal.

Create the barcode:
  1. I added the barcode, using a barcode generator. It has annoying ads, but they are relatively easy to get around.
  2. Click on "No thanks, please take me straight to the free bar codes!"
  3. You will see input boxes halfway down the page. "Barcode message" is where you input your ISBN number without the dashes. If you want a price barcode, place a comma after the ISBN number then enter 90000 (a common number for that portion of the barcode).

    Example: 0123456789,90000.

  4. "Comment" is the text to be printed above the barcode. For books it is: ISBN (Then your ISBN number with the dashes.)

    Example: ISBN 0-12345-678-9

  5. In "Barcode Symbology" click the drop down and select "Bookland". This is the type of encoding used for ISBN numbers.
  6. 300 dpi and PNG worked great for me. Because what is generated is not a single graphics file, you will need to do a screen capture and save that.
Create the cover:
  1. Create a new document with a transparent background sized 11 inches high, 18 inches wide.
  2. Use guides to line up with the various borders and margins. I made the page wider then I actually needed, to compensate for variations in the spine depth, So I put guides where I would expect to crop the edges, then made half inch borders around the edges. I also used guides to denote where the spine would go.[PICTURE]
  3. I filled in the major color blocks, using layers librally, and added text, including the text on the rear cover.
  4. Copy and paste the barcode into your cover file. Adjust layer size until it visually fits. Add pricing in the corner, and a border, if you wish.
  5. Copy and paste your animal into the cover file. Adjust layer size until it fits. I wanted the claws to extend over the color block a little, so I spent some time making sure that looked good.
At this point you should have something that looks like this. A this point I ran into a minor crisis. I was going to use Kinkos to print the cover, but they require a format output by their stupid proprietary software (Don't do it! It sucks!) or PDF's, but it was only at this point that I realized that GIMP doesn't output PDF files. Luckly for me I am using a Mac, and this was solved in a few short seconds, by saving to EPS. When you click on an EPS in a Mac, it automatically converts the file to PDF format. Now it is universally printable. I had a hard time finding good paper for the cover. I found some paper at Art Media on a 19" x 24" pad of 100lb paper, called Strathmore Bristol smooth. It is their 300 series, whatever that means. I decided against getting it laminated, it just would have taken too much time and effort. I then cut the paper into 12" x 19" sheets, and got Kinkos to run them off.