Herein are some random notes about a few of the behind-the-scenes decisions
that affected the book, including a partial timeline. This is probably of
greatest interest to those who are contemplating writing a book of their
own (Nooooooooo! Don't give in to the dark side!!) and want some
idea of what to expect.
Timeline
All told, 15 months from beginning to end, of which 10.5 involved serious
writing:
24 February 1998 - e-mail from Jennifer Niederst (author of
Web Design in a
Nutshell, who was then still working on it), suggesting that
Greg ``should really write a PNG book for O'Reilly!''
4 March 1998 - e-mail from Jennifer's editor, Richard Koman,
triggers serious discussions
15 March 1998 - Greg submits outline proposal (fairly similar
to final outline except that Parts I and II
got switched)
23 March 1998 - Richard reports tentative ``thumbs up'' and
requests a three- to four-paragraph justification /
sales-pitch / feasibility report (why the book is needed, who would
buy it, what value it provides, what makes it unique, etc.)
27 March 1998 - the final go-ahead is given, and contract terms
are first discussed
9 April 1998 - contract is signed; without being too
specific, it involves an advance equal to the royalties from roughly
5000 copies, payable in three parts: one-third after the outline is
submitted, one-third after the first draft is submitted, and one-third
after the final manuscript is submitted. The deadlines for the latter
two were originally given as 1 September and 1 October,
respectively, but those dates made Greg rather nervous (ominous
foreshadowing...), so he pushed them back a month.
20 April 1998 - first chapter submitted (then Chapter 1; later
became Chapter 7)
1 June 1998 - Richard requests the inclusion of one more chapter
(a basic introduction to image formats in general and PNG in particular),
which is what leads to the decision to switch Parts I and II
1 October 1998 - deadline for first draft (it came...it went)
5 October 1998 - Richard requests the names of three potential
technical reviewers
1 November 1998 - deadline for final manuscript
26 January 1999 - initial cover art (the pnguin!)
2 February 1999 - first draft submitted
18 February 1999 - one more chapter (conclusion) inserted
22 February 1999 - final manuscript submitted; official start of
production
23 February 1999 - Richard requests an additional 10 images for
the color insert
25 February 1999 - final cover art (kangaroo rat, sigh)
21 March 1999 - O'Reilly web page is online
26 March 1999 - copyedited version comes back (paper)
30 March 1999 - Greg discovers the O'Reilly
stylesheet for the first(?) time
2 April 1999 - Greg finishes responding to copyedits
19 April 1999 - QC 1.0 (PDF format--looking good!)
26 April 1999 - printing the specifications (Appendices A-E) and
source code (Appendices F-H) is vetoed on grounds of cost; a CD-ROM is
still a possibility, but after soliciting opinions from the PNG Group,
Greg decides against that, too
7 May 1999 - QC 1.1 (PDF format). Normally there wouldn't be a
``1.1'' round, but the rather dramatic last-minute changes (removal of
a bunch of appendices and switch from first-person-plural to
first-person-singular) require extra checking.
7 May 1999 - first draft of press release
10 May 1999 - first draft of back-cover text
11 May 1999 - first draft of index
15 May 1999 - QC 2.0 (PDF format)
19 May 1999 - Phantom Menace opens :-)
21 May 1999 - book shipped to printer
24 June 1999 - Greg receives first two copies via FedEx
<time passes . . .>
September 2001 - book goes out of print (actually, sometime
between 13 August and 24 October)
10 April 2002 - the Free Software Foundation's Bradley Kuhn
inquires about the possibility of relicensing the book under the
GNU Free Documentation
License
13 June 2002 - Greg and O'Reilly sign a contract addendum that
relicenses the book under the GNU FDL
24 July 2003 - Greg releases the complete (and slightly updated)
``second edition'' in online format. Changes include
corrections to some PNG site links and other errata, conversion to fully hyperlinked HTML format, and the upgrade
of many figures to their original, full-resolution, color versions.
(Note that information about the ever-changing level of application
support is not updated, nor are the application links themselves.
See the main PNG site for that.)
Particularly astute readers will notice that Greg missed his deadline by a
solid five months. Whoops. Partly that was due to some additions and changes
that were requested along the way; partly it was due to a problem with the
person who was originally going to test PNG support in the selected image
editors (Greg ended up doing half of them on his own and finding a few
other people to help out with the remainder). But mostly it was just due to
an overly optimistic estimate of how much Greg could accomplish in 8 to 10
hours per week. Our hero likes to think that he writes reasonably well,
but no one can claim that he's particularly fast--especially with the
immense amount of fact-checking and number of updates that went into this book.
Fortunately for Greg, Richard and the other O'Reilly folks were more patient
than he had any right to expect.
Length
Those who checked the main page previously may
have noticed some oddities with the page count. As noted in the timeline, the
original plan was to include all five PNG-related specs (PNG, PNG extensions,
MNG, zlib, deflate) as appendices, as well as full (printed) source code to the
demo programs. That rang in at somewhere between 710 and 740 pages, which was
judged impractical due to cost. The next plan was to print only the PNG and
PNG extensions documents as appendices (about 475 pages) and include a CD-ROM.
But despite Greg's best efforts (and despite the word ``Definitive'' in the
title), inclusion of any specification was vetoed. (For what it's worth,
the then-current edition of HTML: The Definitive Guide didn't include the HTML 4.0 spec,
either.)
The CD-ROM would still have
been possible, but based on a mini-survey conducted within the PNG Group,
most people would just as soon download specs, source code, software and
images from the Internet; CD-ROMs are generally not used very much and add
an annoying stiffness to the back cover of books. Also, Greg would have liked
to have made it a truly useful and complete CD-ROM; among other
things, it would have been nice to include a multi-platform web browser with
really good PNG support. Since such browsers didn't exist at the time (in
fact, not until the release of Netscape 6.0 and concurrent Mozilla milestones
in late 2000), Greg decided to hold off with any CD-ROM until a (possible)
later edition, and then only if there seems to be significant demand for it.
(Postscript: ha ha, so much for that idea!)
Here are the other web pages related to PNG: The Definitive Guide:
![[PNG:TDG cover]](../img_png/pngbook-cover.png)