One night I got the idea to produce a PDF ebook of all back issues of upFront.eZine. Sort of like a service to readers: the whole thing in one file.
(By coincidence I read yesterday that the New Yorker magazine has done the same thing. Their's ships on a portable hard drive. BTW, I have their huge book and dual-CD set of all their cartoons.)
I tested the concept by typesetting one issue. It took me about 10 minutes and it came to eight pages. That's when I hauled out the nearest calculator:
10 minutes x 485 issues = 80 hours or two solid weeks. That's doable for me, but the repeated application of styles would become a mind-numbing job. Maybe I could train one of my kids to do it.
8 pages x 485 issues = 3,880 pages. A document twice the size of the Bible? When I saw that number, that's when I halted the project.
As a developer, I often turn to Herb Sutter's writings for advice. His site started off as a guru-of-the-week (gotw.ca) questions for developers. Over the years, he has produced three books using the material. It's not been a copy and paste operation: the material has been rewritten.
Posted by: Henrik Vallgren | Aug 31, 2006 at 01:54 AM