You may have noticed that the large-print edition of Trust caused me no end of problems, which you might think puts the lie to my assertion that large-print layouts are easier to do than regular layouts.

The reason is was so difficult was simple: I didn't check the length, so I went long, and I had to narrow the margins to make the book the right length.

This was extremely tricky because with a large-print edition you do not indent paragraphs. Instead, you use block paragraphs. So there only thing indicating that two paragraphs are separate from each other is a line of white space caused by an extra hard return.

If you lay a book out in Word, like I do, guess how you force lines onto the next page? With an extra hard return! What about if the last line of a paragraph is the last line on a page? Well, then the next page starts with a white line, which is no good. So you remove that line by removing the extra hard return.

If the paragraphs are indented, it's really easy to recognize the difference between a paragraph break and anything you just moved around to make your layout work--the stuff you moved around isn't indented. You can see that simply by glancing over the layout.

With a large-print edition, the only way to tell those things apart is to actually read the text of the book again--carefully. In some cases I actually had to go to the regular edition to determine if I just sort of changed subjects within the paragraph or if I had lost a hard return.

Option B would have been to start the layout from scratch, but I don't think that would have saved me any time. Next time, I'll go with Option C, which is to be sure to estimate the page length first!