Maria’s Guides

A tip for readers.

Occasionally, I’ll release updated pages to my books when something has changed or is otherwise incorrect. I did that the other day when I released updated pages 90-91 of my Leopard book for Spotlight feature corrections.

This morning, I got a message from a reader who had downloaded the revised pages. She wrote:

I just bought your excellent book, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and noted the corrected pages 90-91 online. A suggestion: Could you have the .pdf pages (and also corrected screenshots, e.g., Figure 5) be the same size as the pages (or figures) in your book ? That way, one could paste the corrected pages over the original pages rather than having to fold 8.5 x 11 paper in half.

I admit I was baffled for a moment. You see, the pages are the same size. The PDFs were created from the same document Peachpit’s production department uses to print the book.

But just in case I was missing something, I printed out pages 90-91 from the PDF to make sure. They were the same size.

Well, that isn’t exactly true. Like the reader who wrote to me, I printed the pages on standard (in the US anyway) 8-1/2 x 11 inch paper. So the pages were that size.

But the content was the right size. So I advised:

When you print the pages from Adobe Reader, make sure Page Scaling is set to None. Print on regular paper. Then cut the pages down to the book trim size, 7 x 9 inches. You will be cutting off part of the gray thumbtab because it’s set up with a bleed.

I hope that helps anyone else interested in inserting pages into their copy of the book.

As for screenshots that I put on the Web site, I’ll make an effort to get them down to the right size in case you want to paste them over the old shot in the book. But they might not print the same size they appear onscreen. Besides, the figures in the book tend to be a bit small. Wouldn’t you rather have them larger so you can see them better?

Or maybe it’s just my middle-aged eyes…