The final result of this job will be the creation of EPUB (iPad and Nook) and MOBI (Kindle) editions of three books, which comprise our Master Course Trilogy: Dancing with Siva, Living with Siva and Merging with Siva. The three books are approximately 1,000 pages each, a total of 3,000 pages in their print layouts.
Not only are these books very l
...arge and graphic rich, there are also some further complexities to them, so we would like to break the project up into the following milestones:
1. First, before creating the ebook versions of the books, we want you to do one process with the InDesign files and linked images first. The InDesign files that we have, which are the most current versions of the text and layouts, were linked to greyscale versions of all the images for Motilal Banarsidass to print in Delhi. We have the original color versions of all the images, and we would like you to relink all the InDesign files to the color versions of the images, which we will provide. We want you to do this task first, and then send the relinked InDesign files back to us for our future print edition work. Then only should you proceed with making the ebook editions from those files, including the incorporation of the color artwork which you will have then linked properly into the InDesign files.
2. The books are primarily in English, however, because we intended particularly the first book in the series, Dancing with Siva, to be a sourcebook respected by academia, many Sanskrit words have been included with diacritical marks. These diacritical marks were applied to our own specially modified version of Adobe's Minion font in the early 1990s, long before Unicode. Thus, the diacritical system is mapped to characters in this Mac Roman encoded Type 1 series of fonts (regular, italic, bold, bold italic and expert). If possible, we would like to have the diacritical marks in the books, but we want to do so using a modern standard system for romanized Sanskrit, probably IAST, which is widely utilized now on the web on many sites, including Wikipedia. This will of course require you to develop a process to convert the diacriticalized characters from the characters they are mapped to in our custom Mac Roman encoded Type 1 fonts to whatever characters they are mapped to in the IAST range. Then, of course, is the issue of fonts. We suspect that, while most desktop computers today have fonts preinstalled that contain the IAST standard diacriticals and display them when they are called by text, the fonts resident on the iPad probably do not. But we are not sure. If they do, excellent. If not, then we will need to take advantage of the iBooks 1.2 new feature allowing us to embed a font, and we will need to of course choose an appropriate font that is both attractive and highly legible. Then of course is the issue of the Nook and Kindle versions of the ebooks, which may need to just have all the diacriticals stripped out and converted to plain Roman characters without diacriticals.
3. Once all of the above is figured out, then we would like to see a sample chapter to try out on our devices to see how it is going to look.
4. Finally, the creation of the complete ebooks of the three books containing the linked images throughout.
We will provide all the InDesign and image files via Dropbox. All the files for Dancing with Siva are there now, and Living with Siva and Merging with Siva will follow shortly. Please check the files that are there. If any of them are not working, please let me know so I can perhaps re-upload them.
Some estimate of how long this project will take, once you have a chance to analyze it, will be helpful, along with the price.
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Added 23 FEB 2011, 15:47 PM EST
For your information, Dancing with Siva is dramatically more complex in terms of layout than the other two books. You will see when you open and examine the InDesign files.
Skills: indesign, photoshop, mac fonts, sanskrit diacriticals, scripted text transformation