Expert Card Technique Refurbished Edition

Feb 23, 2010
42
0
Shame on me, but I have never read Expert Card Technique. I knew what it is and how important a book it is, I just couldn't get my hands on a copy. I really hope I can do that as soon as possible.

While searching for a store that sells the book in my town, I have come across an "ebook" version. I don't know if it is legal, public domain or illegal, this file was the 5th Google result for "expert card technique", so I will assume that I'm not breaking any laws looking at it. The only thing I am violating by looking at this pdf is my eyes. The editing, typesetting and the all-around look of this ebook is hideous. True, this may just be due to my utter hatred for Times New Roman and Arial, or me being overly sensitive to bad design (as I always am), but this is just disgraceful for any book, let alone for an established member of the magician's canon. I started reading it, but got distracted by the footers, the bad quality images and the random Ace of Spades everywhere. My philosophy is to only bother about things that you can change, and I could change this. So, I decided to combine this with something I have wanted to do for a while now: edit and typeset a book on my own in Adobe InDesign.

So I started copying and formatting the text and pictures to my liking. I have never done this before, but I have a vague understanding the design decisions that can make a book nice to look at. I have finished the first chapter (Secret Lifts), and I find it a surprisingly enjoyable pastime. Nevertheless, the book is large, and my time is pretty limited before starting university. I would very much like to bring this "grand project" to an end sometime, but I'm not sure if anyone would benefit from it beside me. I'd be very interested in your opinions and suggestions: how do you like it, should I continue, do you have and tips and ideas, and so on. I have tried to stay faithful to the original style (provided that the ebook did the same), although I had to make the numbering of the illustrations continuous. Might make referencing harder (or actually easier, who knows). If there are any design professionals here, I would be very keen to hear their opinion as well. It is being made as an ebook version (the page size ratio is 4:3, so it is fullscreen on an iPad), but nothing is written in stone.

Thanks for your response.

Here is the link for the pdf (hope it works).

Oh, and happy birthday Theory11! :D
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Aug 17, 2010
411
4
It looks very nice. Good and clean.

The paras lose their indent at page 11. Be sure to have styles set up, and applied to the entire document; it's far easier to have styles set up for heads, subheads body, lists, etc., than it is to apply the attributes consistently throughout the book. The indents tend to break up the monotony of justified copy, and give a little more white space.

As this is an ebook, you may wish to consider having the page numbers appear in one consistent location; going from left to right may come across as confusing when there are no spreads or facing pages.

You may want to consider more space before the heads (THE ONE HAND PUSH-OFF seems to follow the previous paragraph pretty closely, and you may want to give it some extra white space.

I think it looks very nice, and really look forward to seeing it completed.

(I was in print production for a long while before the law.)
 
Feb 23, 2010
42
0
Thank you for the feedback and the responses! JButterfield, I have followed your advice on the page numbers and space before headings, but decided to leave the paragraphs as they are, with no indent (except the 1st paragraphs), but spacing between them. Now that I have cleaned up the paragraph styles with usable heading hierarchy, the formatting is moving along pretty quickly.
 
Searching...
{[{ searchResultsCount }]} Results