Infinimata Press: Projects: Remastering The Back Catalogue

By Serdar Yegulalp on 2020-09-12 18:00:00-04:00 No comments

With Fall Of The Hammer off and out the gate, and Unmortal now in progress (although don't expect anything about that for a good long while), I'm now turning to reissuing all the earlier titles in the formerly Genji Press, now Infinimata Press catalog. This past week I started on new editions of Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned and Welcome To The Fold. It's been alternately fun and frustrating.

The cover art has been the easier of the two. Most of the time all I've had to do is migrate the images and text over to the new templates I'm using, make sure the spacing of the elements looks good, and hit save. The interiors are a little trickier. I saved myself some future pain by making a common book template and re-using that, but I still had to refresh each earlier book with the latest version of the template and make sure no inconsistencies crept in. Not because the template itself was wrong, but because I might have stupidly not applied the proper styles in the original document. (At some point I tried writing some Python scripts that normalized everything, but that proved unwieldy, and I gave it up.)

I've also flirted with the idea of using entirely different editing technologies — e.g., writing the entire book in Markdown or somesuch — but the tools I use now were devised specifically for editing book copy, not code. Git isn't really suited to such things, or at least I haven't found a good way to press it into the service of such work. So I've stuck with Microsoft Word if only because it's a comfortable environment whose quirks I'm familiar with.

The other temptation that's creeping back in, one I've mentioned many times before, is the urge to take the proof copies and re-edit each book essentially from scratch. There's individual moments in all of them that I remember and that chafe at me, and I want to get rid of them, the way you'd cut a dark spot out of the skin of an apple. Maybe once I have the book on my desk, I'll just give up and do it, and try not to go too hog-wild with it — just clean up the most egregious and obvious stuff, but don't try to rewrite the story entirely. Down that path lies George Lucas.