Cartographer's Toolkit

I’m working on a new e-booklet. It was in the planning stage for a couple of months, then in the design stage for a few weeks, now it is in the implementation phase. The topic is:

Typography

That’s the first announcement of the topic though on Twitter I did post a few “teaser” pictures of the book layout. I was trying not to give too much away with the teaser pictures but some feedback was given that they gave so little away it was like nothing at all.

The major thing I had to figure out during the planning stage was whether or not a booklet on typography was going to be even possible. It’ll be distributed as a pdf, which means the fonts will have to be embedded in the file, which means that any font that is under a for-fee commercial license would not be able to be showcased. I briefly tried to get one of the major font companies to provide permission to use their fonts in the booklet but this was immediately (though politely) declined. I am sure that if it were to be a print-only publication then this would have had a different outcome. This is because showcasing a for-fee font on paper would not then mean that the book owner had access to the font files as it has the potential to do with the pdf format.

However, that issue is now fixed and I’m now firmly in implementation mode. The two major goals that I’ve been keeping in mind in this phase is:

1. Make it extremely useful
2. No filler

I’m really hoping that the publication date will be either next week or the week after that but we’ll see how things go. In all, I’m very excited about this product as it’ll be a very handy reference for GIS and cartography types as well as for myself!