OK

I laid out a couple of the chapters--I think they look OK. I'm not making any great claims for my eye, of course, but I've worked with designers enough to know that stacks, loose lines, and widows are bad, and to have some vague clue as to how one goes about fixing them. I think I've figured out enough about Acrobat to get everything into the PDF format OK.

I got surprised when I did some high-quality printouts of the covers on high-res paper (using up another thing of toner in the process). I figured I would spot errors (and I did), but mainly I realized that 1. the things you can't read very easily in a crappy printout can't be read in a good printout either, and 2. my name, which is totally legible on the electronic version of the front cover, is completely illegible in a printout! It's not just that it doesn't stand out--you can't read it at all. So I went with light-blue letters. Now I can't decide if that's too Easter-eggish (and let me tell you, my freebie photo editing software tends a LOT toward the Easter-egg end of the spectrum), but I did try gray and white before, and they have legibility problems as well. (OK, I just went back and found an icier blue.)