Looks like my trial version of Keynote has spellcheck turned on. :-D

Nice! Wait—you’re using Keynote to make type samples?

Thanks, Mark... And I can explain about using Keynote! I just got a new computer, and I barely have anything on my hard drive! I was planning to download trial versions of Adobe applications today, but because of a glitch in the code, their downloads are not available until July 1... By then I will have bought the CS3 design suite, anyway. Meanwhile, er.... there’s Keynote. :-/

I heard recently (I think on Mac Break Weekly podcast) of a designer who does everything in Keynote. I did a book in Illustrator once. Thirty-some pages on an giant grid. Dave Eggers (of McSweeny’s fame) does all his writing in Quark 4.

I did a book in Illustrator once. Thirty-some pages on an giant grid.

My hat is off to you, sir. That must have been quite a task! But it’s much better to present a book created in Illustrator than in MS Word (I’ve heard horror stories from printers in that regard). I understand Chip Kidd writes in QuarkXPress, too, but that’s less surprising, coming from a graphic designer. (And heck, even QuarkXPress 3 worked well as a word processor.)

But, yeah, it’ll be nice to finally try FontTool and FontLab at home, now that I have the right OS...

The book I did in Illustrator (3.0, I think) was very graphics-heavy. Part of it was a timeline that spread over many pages. The book’s pages were set up as tiles. It was actually kind of nice to see it all at once, from a bird’s-eye view, and then zoom in to a particular spot to work. It was also nice to be able to work directly and in-context with the graphics on each page (the main reason it was done this way). Overall, it felt like a very organic way to work, but I don’t think it would be practical for most books. Bleeds would be a problem, for instance.