Bucking the trend to everything electronic (PDF or html or Flash or...), a client has requested printed docs for a project. Moreover, they've requested a specific, tricky page feature that I don't know how (or if) I can do in OOo Writer.
If you are old enough, you might remember printed-on-paper technical books... :-) Some of them had color blocks printed right to the outside edge of the pages, so that they'd show (vaguely) when you viewed the closed book from the side, or when you had the book open with a mass of pages on one side of the spine. The color blocks were maybe a centimeter in height, and their position changed from chapter to chapter. So, viewed from the edge of the closed book, you'd see staggered steps from the beginning of the book to end. Big chapters made for thick steps. These blocks of color were called "thumbtabs" and were a visual aid to quickly finding a given chapter without doing a lot of physical paging. Some old (expensive) dictionaries had actual physical cutouts in the page edges to correspond with the color blocks, so you'd insert the edge of your thumb into the indentation and break the book open at that section. From there, any desired page in that section was only a few page-flips away. I'm not interested in the physical cutouts (very expensive), just the to-the-edge printing of the carefully-placed color blocks. Aside from seeing the ghost of the edge-bleed steps when you viewed the closed book, you could hold the book spine in one hand and fan the pages rapidly with the other hand, stopping when the large, obvious numbered blocks for chapter 7 (or whichever one you wanted) flashed by. Note, I'm not talking about printing on the actual edges of pages. I'm talking about printing on the face of each page that goes all the way TO the edge. It's called edge-bleed. . . similar to when you get borderless photo-prints. The ink or dye goes all the way to the edge. To make a long story longer, I had a way to do it in FrameMaker such that each chapter would have a one-centimeter-tall block of ink at the outside edge of each page, with a large white numeral (the chapter number) in the color block. Then the color blocks for the next chapter would be slightly lower on the side of the page, and the next chapter slightly lower again. It was pretty-much automatic, including starting at the top of the page once the previous chapter's markers had reached page-bottom. For me, chapter 1 had its edge-bleed markers near the top of the page, then they stepped down with each chapter through chapter 10. If there was a chapter 11, it's marker block was back near the top of the page again, and so on. TWO QUESTIONS: Does anybody understand what I'm talking about? Has anybody done it, in OOo Writer? (bonus question.... How?) Cruddy ascii sketch follows (best viewed in mono-spaced font. All pages in chapter 1 would have this arrangement. ______________________________________ | |----| | | Ch | | | 1 | | |----| | | | Text text text text text | | text text text text text | | and more text and more | | text and more text and | | so on and so on and so on | | and so forth and yet more | | text | | | | | ______________________________________ While the second chapter would be like this: ______________________________________ | | | | | |----| | Text and headings and all | Ch | | sorts of other nice stuff | 2 | | and notice that the edge- |----| | bleed tab is a little | | lower on the page for | | this chapter... | | | | And more text and more | | and yadda yadda yadda | | | | | | | | | ______________________________________ And the third... getting the idea? ______________________________________ | | | | | | | Blabbity-blah-blah-blah | | |----| | Text and headings and all | Ch | | sorts of other nice stuff | 3 | | and notice that the edge- |----| | bleed tab is a little | | lower yet again on the | | page for this chapter... | | | | And more text and more | | and yadda yadda yadda | | | | | ______________________________________ Thanks, - Kevin The information contained in this electronic mail transmission may be privileged and confidential, and therefore, protected from disclosure. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to this message and deleting it from your computer without copying or disclosing it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
