Goleta DeskTop Publishing User Group
Meeting Information

June 7 -- Publishing a Book on a Hybrid CD
by Harold Adams and Dana Trout

Click here to see associated article.

Say you need to distribute 60 copies of a book that's several hundred pages long. You've looked at getting it printed and it's out of your budget, especially since it has a bunch of color pictures. So what can you do?

Well, most people have computers now, and almost all of those have a connection to the Internet and the ability to read a CD. If your book is mainly text you can publish it on the Internet, but if it has lots (like hundreds) of pictures and most of the intended recipients have only dial-up access to the Internet, you can put your tome on a CD which will display the pictures much faster than retrieving them from the Internet. And publishing a few copies on recordable CDs (CD-R) is no budget-buster -- each one costs well under a dollar and can be mailed with a couple of stamps.

Regardless of whether you publish on the Internet or on a CD there are a few issues that raise their ugly heads. You want the recipients to be able to read your book, so what form should you publish it in? The leading contenders are (1) as a series of HTML files (everybody has a web browser that will happily display those files), (2) as PDF (Portable Document Format) files, or (3) as QuickTime movies. Both PDF and QuickTime are popular formats and many already have the programs to display them -- for those that don't the programs are available on the Web for free. We will dicuss and display the relative merits of each of these approaches.

Another big issue is not everyone has the same kind of computer: many have Windows machines, most of the rest have Macintoshes. You want everyone to be able to read your book so what can you do? One method is to make a basic ISO-9660 CD, but that makes for an unattractive product: file names are limited to 8 characters with a 3-character extension, making it impossible to name a file "Read me first" or "Double-Click Me".

Windows uses the "Joliet" standard for long filenames and deeply nested directories (folders) on a CD while the Mac uses its own file system. You could make separate CDs for the Mac and Windows, but there's a better solution: a hybrid CD. To a Windows computer it looks just like a Windows disk complete with custom icon and can use the AutoRun function to open the book. On the Mac it looks just like a Mac disk, complete with disk name and the ability to specify how it displays on the desktop. Best of all, each of the two sections can use the same files (like image files), so the space used on the CD isn't much more than what would be used on a Mac-only or Windows-only CD. We will discuss the design issues involved in making a hybrid CD, including how to get the Windows AutoRun feature to work, and demonstrate the process of actually creating a hybrid CD.

Please send email to gdtpug@troutcom.com with suggestions for topics you are interested in seeing covered. Or even better, volunteer to give a presentation!

The Goleta DeskTop Publishing Users Group is a SIG (Special Interest Group) of the Santa Barbara PC Users Group. We are not platform specific: some members have PCs, some have Macs, some have both. Linux and other systems are sprinkled in as well for good measure. We focus on the issues of publishing in all forms, be it on paper, web, CD-ROM, or some other medium.