Book Update in progress

As some of you may know, publishing a book is hard work.  Indeed, actually writing the book in the first place was just the first step in a very long process which I had completely underestimated the first time I published anything (the Cubase 6 version of the book, which was around 450 pages, and took a couple of years of work to get together).  With any such large project, there’s always something which you feel could be improved, and one of those things has been the screenshots in the book – this is a combination of multiple factors, some of which are completely out of my control (the file format that is sent to the printers and the printing quality are a couple that spring to mind).

However, one that is within my control is the quality of the source images; these have always been pixel-accurate screenshots of menus and graphics in Cubase, but they are not always as readable as you might hope – usually because they are blown up from their on-screen size to a much larger one which then looks blocky – despite efforts to keep them looking as they actually do on screen.

To improve this in the next edition of the book, wherever possible menus and screenshots from the Mac version will be used; they contain 4x as many pixels, and mean that the print version should be easier to read wherever it is possible; there’s so much which is identical in form and function across the two versions that this seemed the right way to go.  However, it has meant over 3 weeks of full time work to capture the screenshots needed (which at current count is 1,104 images taken!).

Here’s an animation of a typical part of the inspector, hopefully showing the improvement in graphics across platforms and in the next version of the book, which is the biggest revision since its initial creation.

Improvement in graphics on a HiDPI display (Mac) vs PC.