It’s amazing how quickly that step actually went, and particularly since it could have gone so much faster had I known what I wanted to do before I started.
For convenience in locating specific sections, my Romans notes were written in table format. Each chapter of the epistle was a new “section” in the word processing software, and each section was comprised of one three-column table–the leftmost column for the verse numbers and broad outline, giving the point and parameters of each paragraph, the middle column containing my translation of the text, and the right-hand and widest column giving the detailed analysis. I had considered publishing it in that format, printed “landscape”, that is, eleven inches wide by eight and a half high, probably bound on the long side such that it would be more like a flip chart than a book. However, there was more white space than I wanted, and even with the idea that users might wish to make notes I could not justify the expense of such a long book. Instead, I decided to reformat it more traditionally, to a “portrait” layout, losing the tables and placing the outline, numbering, and translation between the sections of detail. In doing so, I reduced the page count from near a thousand to under six hundred, so I obviously eliminated a great deal of white space.
There were several time-consuming aspects to this. In particular, I wished to convert the tables to text such that there would be a double paragraph break at each cell break, but that was not an option of the conversion. The simple solution was to choose a symbol which was not used anywhere in the text, use that symbol at the cell breaks, and then do a global replace of that symbol with the double paragraph break. It worked, but at one point I forgot which symbol I was using and used one that was used in a few places in the text, so I had to return and correct those places where the replace should not have been made.
The other was that after I had reformatted all the tables to text, I realized that the verse numbers and translation text were not so easily distinguished from the commentary detail. I thus had to go through and, verse by verse, reformat these. I had to do some other reformatting at the same time, adjusting the line breaks, so I would have had to have done the verse by verse work anyway; but it would have saved several keystrokes on each verse had I reformatted that text while it was still in table layout rather than after the fact. I made the decision that the table-to-text conversions had taken long enough that it would not be worth reversing them to save the time on the text formatting, but still spent quite a bit of time on it. For what it’s worth, Romans, the longest of Paul’s epistles, has four hundred thirty-one verses plus a subscription (in the Greek manuscripts, the title and authorship and related information are appended to the end of a book), so I was at this for a while.
The result of this is, with the addition of a title page and the drafting of a brief forward, the Romans book is finished. I will have to do the conversion to PDF, and upload it to the publisher, and design the cover (although being more on the lines of a “scholarly” work, a simple faux leatherette look with the title and author will be sufficient, so I need not hassle with cover art).
Of course, Do You Trust Me? is also waiting to be published, so I face the question of which to publish first–or whether to launch both at once. That, though, is a decision that will have to wait until there is money in the bank, something that doesn’t happen easily in the beginning of September when school expenses hit.
–M. J. Young
