New Font for Blog Book

I have been working on converting this blog to a book.  One of my concerns was the type face (font) I was going to use when the book goes to print.  My 95-year-old mother has trouble reading small print and I find more and more people gravitating toward large-print books.

I went to the public library yesterday looking for some audiobooks by Rick Riordan.  While looking for the audiobooks, I actually picked-up a print version and the librarian (Thanks, Amy) showed me the front page with the publication data that included the font used for the book.  The book was easy to read and I liked the font.  The font used for The Last Olympian was Centaur MT, 13 point.

I came home and looked for the font on my computer.  Unfortunately I didn't have it and I immediately went to Adobe.com.  I have used Adobe Type Manager for years and thought that Adobe would have the font.

While Adobe Type Manager is largely outmoded--built-in to such programs as Windows Vista--the font was available from Adobe.  I don't know if anyone remembers the "typeballs" used by the IBM Selectric typewriters.  Each ball was for a font and you had to purchase and to change the balls when you wanted to change type face in your typed documents.  The fonts for the computer work in a similar way.  I had to purchase and download three different fonts--Centaur Std, Centaur Std Italic, and Centaur Std Bold--in order to have the three types of fonts I need for the book.  The good news is that they were available and I was able to purchase, download, and install (after using Adobe help menus) the fonts on my computer (in Windows Vista) and in two Adobe programs, PageMaker 7.0 and Adobe Acrobat 9.0 Pro Extended.

You won't see that type face on this blog except in a picture I will include here.  It will work for the book and for the onscreen version of the book.  I need to contact my print-on-demand printer tomorrow to make sure everything will work when I present the finished book in Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format for publishing.

Information Retrieval in a "Green Economy"--Paper or Digital Data or Both?

I'm still working on taxes and, as usual, am finding more success looking for information I have stored on my computer than paper files that I have stored in containers.  Some paper is missing and I went online to the providers of the paper, only to find that the Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) versions of the missing files are not available online.  Instead they are mailing me paper copies.  Because their computer gave me some initial information, I was able to go to my own data files (a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet) and confirm the data I needed.

For many years I have found it easier to find and retrieve essential information stored digitally on the computer--with supporting external hard drives--than dealing with paper.  Google Desktop, a free program from Google, has made my life much easier by indexing all of my drives and external hard drives.  I can institute a Google Search of that Desktop Index and it displays the location of the files and, sometimes, a temporary copy of the file.  If I have rearranged or deleted the file in the mean time, it cannot help me.

While I realize that it is sometimes important to retain paper copies of things (tax returns for example), I also know that I can retrieve and share information much more effectively and quickly working with digital data files.

TurboTax, by Intuit, prints a .pdf version of my tax return that I keep on my computer.  It also keeps a version in TurboTax and allows me to submit my tax returns by e-filing directly to the state and federal government.