BIP Paper Size: ITT

[Rev. St. Syn, KSC (Ret.)]

Righto, there have been some posts made about formatting BIP pamphlets/flyers, whatever and keeping them consistent for ease of editing, sharing, colaborating, printing etc, but nothing firm has come out of it.

The way I see it, we only really have two choices here. A4 or Letter.

Most people here are physically located in the US, so I propose we stick to the Letter format for the sake of easyness.

The original BIP/Machine^tm flyers are cleverly done so they can be folded neatly and stapled. Great, but I think this is off-putting in that it's got to be thought about and planned out if you're printing off a few. It can get confusing. This is also a problem if you're using your bosses laser printer surreptitiously, you really do want to print and go.

My thoughts on this are: K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Stupid!

With Letter size, you can print and go quickly and easily; lots less work. Either way, we can easily scale to our local paper size when printing. Okay, at a full page size-wise they're not so neat, but they might get noticed more. Also, at Letter size these can go straight on Lulu without major re-working, if we decide to compile them into a book form.


Please to note:
> If we agree to a paper size, we also need to agree to formatting that size - margins, gutters, etc - again KISS - I propose to leave it to Word/OO default, or I can host BIP templates on an agreed to size. Formatting poll to run later, so lets keep this discussion to the paper size for now.
> This isn't intended to put the kybosh on specialist pamphlets, projects and posters, or to cramp anyones style. It's just a way to keep collaboration simple.
> I've put a 28 day deadline on this poll, so we get a definitive answer.

If a mod could sticky this, that'd be great.

[AFK]

I think is the correct motorcycle to be riding.
Plug and play for the win.
And you make a good point.  People can continue to do their own thing with pamphlets, etc. but for collaboration's sake, the less formatting hurdles the better.  Gives more time to focus on content.  So consider this an aye vote for your formatting suggestions.   

[LHX]

i was thinking the landscape-style layout like we had before where you would have a 8.5 x 11 split so that it could be two pages per side

but youre right

keeping it simple is the easiest formatting style


use defaults wherever possible

big fan of this notion


i guess the only other thing to consider is whatever format is the cheapest

[Triple Zero]

syn wrote:

> Most people here are physically located in the US, so I propose we stick to
> the Letter format for the sake of easyness.

hrm .. of course i like A4 from my POV, but otoh, i usually select "scale to fit",
so that's fine with me.

> My thoughts on this are: K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Stupid!

best digital production meme ever.

LHX wrote:

> i was thinking the landscape-style layout like we had before where you would
> have a 8.5 x 11 split so that it could be two pages per side

while i agree that this is very nice and slick looking, i have never actually
managed to get this format to look properly on an A4 printer, especially not when
printing in full-duplex (doublesided) mode.
1 - with printing Letter on A4, the margins fuck up and if you fold it, it won't have
the gutter at the same position on both sides.
2 - when printing double-sided on my uni printer, you gotta imagine, if you print it
so that it reads like a book when you print consecutive full-pages, the printer
needs to flip them upside-down every other page, which means printing anything in
Landscape layout gets the doublesided business upside-down.

i'm aware that both of these are basically printer-configuration problems, and i could
probably solve them for myself if i'd tried hard enough, but usually i don't have
the time for that and that fukin uni printer is always messing up the settings.

> i guess the only other thing to consider is whatever format is the cheapest

as for format, i strongly recommend PDF.
most important reason for this is that i don't use microsoft Word. at the university we
got linooks+openoffice but openoffice is a very screwy program that never loads Word
documents correctly and completely fucks up printing them as well (i think this is mostly
a problem of the sysadmins at Computer Sciences aren't able to install OO properly)

anyway the point is that PDF always looks like it's supposed to look. plus, it's the
standard output of proper DTP programs like Adobe Indesign.

too bad we don't have some kind of easy standard content-markup format, for people who want
to write, but no layout, and just want to mark up simple stuff like paragraphs, quotations,
headings and emphasis. ok, admittedl, this is what HTML was originally intended for, but
things just didn't turn out that way.
I suggest, in these cases, don't be shy, and simply create a new page on the wiki. it's got these formatting, looks good and is much easier than
HTML.

on the other hand, there are people who don't do Indesign, and if they're going to produce any
PDF it will be from a PDF-printerdriver straight out of MS Word. this is of course shooting
yourself in the foot.

so my vote will be then
- Letter-size because most people here don't got A4-sized paper and because Lulu likes it
- full-page layout for not messing up doublesided printing
- PDF for pretty layouts
- write stuff on the wiki for simple markup

[LHX]

I suggest, in these cases, don't be shy, and simply create a new page on the wiki. it's got these formatting, looks good and is much easier than
HTML.

smart

[Cramulus]

Sweet progress ITT...

as far as font goes, my vote is for Arial. Not too fancy, and way easy to read.

and Pssst, I can't seem to make an account on the Wiki. When I go to "create account / log in", there's only a log in option.

[Cain]

You have to let an admin there make an account for you.

[Cramulus]

what's the point of having a wiki that we can't even troll? 

[Triple Zero]

also, i say, for printed text: serif fonts for body, sans-serif for headings.

so that would be
- times/garamond/bookman old/georgia/etc for body text
- arial/impact/tahoma/helvetica/trebuchet/etc for headings
- comic sans ONLY for bible quotations

[Rev. St. Syn, KSC (Ret.)]

comic sans ONLY for bible quotations

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

also, i say, for printed text: serif fonts for body, sans-serif for headings.

so that would be
- times/garamond/bookman old/georgia/etc for body text
- arial/impact/tahoma/helvetica/trebuchet/etc for headings
- comic sans ONLY for bible quotations

Comic sans for bible quotations, nice.


No Times.  No Arial.  Avoid those cliches at all costs.  Bookman Oldstyle, pls if you do serifs.

I'm a big fan of Gill Sans and Helvetica Neue (for it's extremely snooty fashion association).

I also think you should consider heavy slab-serifs/squares like Rockwell. 

[Triple Zero]

No Times.  No Arial.  Avoid those cliches at all costs. 

agreed. initially i just didnt want to hit people with too many unknown names, but you're right, just avoid the cliches, pick anything else.


although--on a sidenote--Times is slowly making its comeback on the web having been shunned for so long by most webdesigners (who wants to make their website text look like an Apache error page?) it can now--when used subtle and with care--make for a nice heading here and there. especially if you fiddle with the letter-spacing CSS property, setting it to a small positive or negative value. (sorry, getting a bit OT here)

[Rev. St. Syn, KSC (Ret.)]

Agreed 000, I like Times if it's used properly. I think we'd be safe to stick to the base fonts (windows comes with a few alternatives to Times/Arial as standard) and if there were any we particularly felt attached to for a particular item - well, this is the Internet.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

Agreed 000, I like Times if it's used properly. I think we'd be safe to stick to the base fonts (windows comes with a few alternatives to Times/Arial as standard) and if there were any we particularly felt attached to for a particular item - well, this is the Internet.

You're not laying this out in Word are you!? 

[Rev. St. Syn, KSC (Ret.)]

What are you proposing?

It would be good to all use the same program, saves having to fuck around fixing inconsistencies.

/Syn - Word/OO fan.