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The project now starts to feel real. The print proofs have arrived from Amazon and seeing my writing in actual book form for the first time is quite weird.
Now the work of re-reading and fact-checking starts.. I hope these marker pens will have enough ink in them!
Book size
Initially I planned to make the book as close to the size of the Amiga user manual as possible. However, while typesetting I realised that this was too small and led to too many breaks in function arguments. It also required a large number of pages, increasing the cost of the book. With Amazon's print-on-demand service the print cost depends on the number of pages, but not on the actual size of the pages. I checked the size of a number of other programming books and used that size for typesetting the print proof.
When reviewing the printed proof I realised that the margins were too small. This was especially true for the bind margins. Unfortunately adding another centimetre or so to the bind margin immediately caused problems for some of the functions with long argument lists. To fix this I increased the size of the book one more time, this time selecting one size up from the books on my shelf. This lowered the page count and also made a number of multi-line functions now fit on a single line. A win on both counts.
Shades of grey
For the lines of the tables as well as the line at the top of the page I used 40% grey. In the instruction sections of the assembly chapter I also used 40% grey to indicate the address modes that were unsupported for that particular instruction. The supported modes are printed in black. To me it was important that the distinction between the two was obvious, while at the same time still keeping the greyed out ones readable. This did not work out as planned; the 40% grey was almost invisible to the naked eye. In the end I changed the top line to a slightly thinner black line and changed the others all to 75% grey.
