User:Simon/The Open Work

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bootleg book: The Open Work

Printed: 20.12.19
Dimensions: 123x180mm
Cover stock: Heavy pink stock (unknown brand) - around 210gsm
Text stock: Laser 80gsm
Binding: Perfect bound, hot glue
Pages: 322pp

I had a PDF of Umberto Eco's The Open Work that I wanted to read, but hadn't got round to it. Such a vast, sprawling text needs to be read and digested slowly, so I decided to print the PDF. Unfortunately, the file I had was a scan of spreads, not pages, so after placing all the pages in InDesign I had to make sure that each page of the file corresponded to each page of the book. I used a dark line at the centre of each page to align with the edge of the pages in the InDesign file. Little did I know or realise at the time that this was an artefact from OCR, and that the text was riddled with such quirks that at times made the text almost unreadable. This happens sometimes if you edit a PDF in a program such as Adobe Acrobat Pro, which includes the option to run OCR all over the document. However, this function doesn't just layer an invisible txt over the images in the PDF, it replaces the images with a text file, in a font (or fonts) specified by the editor. I think that is what happened here, because on printing I discovered that a multitude of artefacts resulting from this technique - unreadable lines, characters that most likely were interpretations of marks and smudges, and a change in font every three or four pages, making for a text that had what seemed to be multiple personalities. This would be a great design approach for such a text - which is about participatory processes making up an art work - but most likely just a happy accident. The cover was made on the photocopier, simply by cutting text from the PDF, pasting and copying it to a heavy sheet of pink paper.

  • Front cover

  • Spread

  • OCR artefacts

  • Spine

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