Since yesterday went well enough, today I was like, “I should get going on that large-print edition.”

Dear God.

For starters, LibreOffice decided to crash rather spectacularly. It crashes so much less often than Word that I get confused when it does. And this was one of those sneaky stealth crashes, where it pretends like it’s saving what you’re doing, but then you realize that you’ll have to do it all over again.

So I restarted everything and worked in a manner designed to put the fewest expectations on LibreOffice, and I managed to get each part saved so that it’s at least roughly ready to be laid out.

Then I laid out the Introduction and started on Part 1—oy. The very large parts of this book mean that the large-print sections are HUGE. The main design issue is that I don’t think I can line up the bottoms given the fact that there are letters and explanatory passages that I’m trying to make look different from each other in a way that doesn't utterly run afoul of the APH guidelines. I’m not thrilled about that—I think uneven text blocks in a layout look really amateurish and shitty—but if you’re following APH you’re already sacrificing design for accessibility, so I guess I just have to accept it. I mean, it’s World War II nonfiction—which skews to an older audience that is more likely to be visually-impaired—so arguably this is the most-important book for me to make accessible.

ETA: I updated LibreOffice, which will either make things better or SO MUCH WORSE…..