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Book of Booklets

A fellow user shares the below tip.

I've recently published my cookbook of 255 recipes 300 pages long, without printing in the ‘normal´ way. The normal way of printing the cookbook is to choose from the Print/Publish Recipes window for the Print Range option set to Entire Cookbook. What the program will do when this option is chosen is to number the pages sequentially 1 to 300 for the entire book without a break. The major problem with using this option is that it is very inflexible for making future changes which are almost inevitable. Say that you want to add a recipe to the middle of the book. After doing so, you may think that just 1/2 the book would have to be printed. Not so. You have to print the whole book again to correct the Table of Contents and any of the Indices (Recipe and/or Category).

Rather than do that, I've chosen to treat the book as a group of booklets, whose printing is independent of each other. Now, the addition of a recipe to one of the booklets means to reprint just that one booklet to bring your cook book up to date. What is in each booklet depends upon how you choose to sort the cookbook (sort by Author, Alphabet, Category, Cuisine, etc.) I chose to sort by Category. Each of the booklets are independently numbered starting with page 1. The booklets when printed includes their own Title Page and Table of Contents that shows what pages each recipe is printed on. The booklets are then bound in a three-ring binder with dividers indicating the selected categories, such as Poultry, Sandwiches, Desserts, etc.

In the back of the book is a Recipe Index showing the category for every recipe listed alphabetically. This tells you indirectly where you can find the recipe if you know its name. Creating this index was the biggest problem, but once made, it will be easy to maintain. The steps taken to create it were (1) print a Table of Contents (without page numbers) for the whole cookbook. (2) Scan the list into a word processor. (3) Create a two column table from this list with the category entered into the second column corresponding to each recipe.

Normally, if the Recipe index option for printing a cookbook is selected, an index will be printed at the end of the cookbook. The index lists the title of each recipe in alphabetical order with the page numbers listed after each recipe. However, if the cookbook is a book of category booklets the page numbers are not listed for each recipe. The category/categories are listed instead. To locate the recipe then, the category booklet is turned to where the page number is listed in its own Table of Contents. This is a very flexible and efficient way in organizing and maintaining a cookbook. The concept is based on the fact that page numbers for recipes are quite variable during a cookbook´s development, whereas the category for the recipe isn't variable. Also, most cookbooks are organized by category such as Breads, Meat Dishes, Seafood, etc.

There are two ways to create a Recipe Index for a cookbook of booklets. The first and best way would have the program print it for you. The second way is to generate it yourself. In the above reference the procedure suggested was "(1) print a Table of Contents (without page numbers) for the whole cookbook. (2) Scan the list into a word processor. (3) Create a two column table from this list with the category entered into the second column corresponding to each recipe.

A problem with step 3 is that the categories are entered manually into the table which is a slow process because each succeeding recipe in the alphabetical list of recipes is likely to be different. Thus, to keep a correct account of recipe/category correspondence is time consuming and highly error prone process. A second more mechanical way is do change the first step to (1) Print a Table of contents for each category booklet. Then (2) is to scan each list into the word processor. Now, in step (3), there is no question as what category is to be entered into the 2nd column. When all the Recipe index tables are created in a single word processor file, the tables are merged and then the resulting table is sorted alphabetically for the 1st column.

This table is then printed for inclusion into the cookbook.

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