Final Alignment and Retemplating

Final alignment

This last step actually took quite a while because I was revisiting that granularity issue and realizing that many of the paragraphs could be broken up a bit more. The interesting thing was finding a phrase or cluster of words in one part of a long sentence that was actually the same cluster of words used at a different part of the chunk in every other translations.

For example, this one seemed necessary.

The Harris translation was missing 2 of the phrases entirely, and Wilson was missing one. It was tricky to determine that Bennett translating “know limitations” was very likely translated from the same source text that Groff translated as “Apprehending the intangibles.” This was deduced based on the other text around it fitting better with other phrases, before and after.

However, in this case, I started to wonder if this fine-granularity was maybe too much:

It was fairly straightforward, the wording was clearly parallelized, and the sequence was the same. My reasoning was that while the intent was very clear and unambiguous, there were enough nominally different wordings that it would provide greater clarity to break apart the phrases.

Altogether, I have read through this text at LEAST a half-dozen times at this point. That’s been very helpful in understanding the intent better, to make those sorts of decisions. I’ve not memorized it but feel fairly confident I can speak somewhat authoritatively on most of its contents. So victory, there!

Retemplating & Pre-flight

When reviewing the options available at my local print shop, I considered “what if it was printed in US Letter, landscape, and spiral bound?” Thankfully, InDesign lets you do alternate layouts fairly easily, so I tried one out. It took a couple hours to get all the text ported over correctly (I probably biffed something in the original layout), but the new layout is much easier to read. Each column now gets a full 3” with a 3/8” gutter between. Using spiral binding allows it to to be laid flat, so it ends up being effectively 17” wide.

Off to the printers!