Sunday, 18 April 2005 at 4:01pm -- I'm done the first of four books on AutoCAD 2006!
This book's called AutoCAD LT 2006: The Definitive Guide. (I didn't pick the title; the publisher, Wordware Publishing, first called it "AutoCAD LT 2006: The Ultimate Guide" but then changed their minds in the last week.)
I've written several series of books for Wordware since 1991: AutoCAD, AutoCAD LT, and Visio. The first title was Learn AutoCAD in a Day. "In a day?" people would snort. Sure: the book was eight chapters, and each designed to be completed in an hour or less. It was slim at 144 pages, and based on AutoCAD Release 11, the DOS version.
After updating the book for Release 12, Wordware asked me to switch over the underserved market of AutoCAD LT. I wrote editions of the book for AutoCAD LT Release 1, Release 2, LT 95, LT 97, and LT 98. (What is little known is that LT was being programmed by an independent group at Autodesk, and they were sneaking in features that AutoCAD lacked. That has since come to an end.)
At LT 2000, Wordware asked me to write an advanced book for LT. That was tough, seeing's how LT lacks proper 3D, rendering, programming, and on and on. I finally pumped out a book that covered customizing, Diesel programming, CAD management, and networking: Learn AutoCAD LT 2000 for the Advanced User. Autodesk didn't advance LT, so this title remained as the only edition -- until recently.
I updated the LT book for 2000i and 2002... and then the series ground to a halt. When it came time to sign the contract for the LT 2004 book, Wordware and I couldn't agree to terms. Every six months or so, we'd take another stab at coming to an agreement, and then talks broke off. At the beginning of this year, we tried again. After ground-giving by both sides, we signed a deal for me to combine the two books (Learn and Advanced) into a single, 500-page volume and updated for LT 2006. That's the book I finished today.
(I deliver the book fully typeset as a PDF file. Typesetting is done in trusty PageMaker 7.01, and then coverted to PDF with Distiller using a joboption file provided by Wordware. I updload the 10.7MB PDF via ftp to Wordware, who then pass it on to the printers. I dunno when the book will be available, maybe in a couple months.)
The "Learn Visio" series was the best-selling Visio title until Microsoft came along and killed the entire market with its sanitized "Visio Inside Out" series. Bitter? Sure. It's not like Microsoft needed the few thousand a year I made from that series. (I now sell the former Wordware-brannded Visio books as e-books, under the titles of Inside Visio 2002 and Tailoring Visio 2002.)
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