Sharing our Links to the Past
by Wally and Frances Gray

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FAMILY HISTORY TIDBITS
By Wally Gray

Producing Family Histories

 How Do You Produce the Book?

 Compose the book on your computer. Have your spouse or another second party proofread and edit it many times during and at the final production. A second party can give all kinds of suggestions. It is surprising how many errors you can pick up each time the manuscript is checked.

 Pictures are entered by using a scanner. My Microsoft Word program allows me to wrap the text around the pictures, and use various fonts and interesting uses of the type.

 After the book (still on your computer) is read, re-read, proofread, (from draft print-outs), burn the finished product on a CD or other type of disk and take it to a print shop. Use a shop that will print directly from the disk. That way you are not losing the clarity of the photos and text. I used OfficeMax to do the job. I had the shop print on 3-hole pre-punched paper.  We placed our finished book in loose-leaf view binders which allowed us to include a front and  back cover and spine (the sheets are inserted in the plastic covers of view binders.) There are other methods of  binding such as spiral or comb, all of which can be done by your print shop. Or you can buy your own binding equipment. (You can have more than one file on your CD. Just tell the printer how to organize the book from the files.)

  Cost

 We paid 7 cents a sheet for the printing. We paid $2 for each binder. We were able to produce an 88-page book for $10 per book. We had nothing but black and write pages. Color pages are considerably more expensive. What color photos I had I converted them to black and white or grayscale in the scanning process.

 In our next book we will include color pictures. To save money we will do what a friend did. He used his computer printer. We plan to print the color pages on our computer printer, and let the professional print shop do the black and white pages. If you are going to use a computer printer be sure it has archival ink. My friend used an Epson Stylus computer printer. We bought the latest model (C84) for around $100. The ink is permanent and waterproof.

©1998-2008 Wallace F. and Frances M. Gray. This web page may be freely linked. To contact us send to grayfox2@cox.net  Their home page is http://geocities.datacellar.net/wallygray25/index.html