Calculation of book folds.

**karina palm** · 12-13-2015, 12:24 PM

Hi. I'm new in excel but I have a question. I do book folding. That's an art, where you, feks write a name or a word in a text program and make lines or strips vertical through the letters. Normaly one stripe is one pixel. Then each line/strip are folded using one sheet in a book, but when i come to letters like e, a, o, s etc, I'll need to fold one sheet in each level of the letter. That means that I can see how many pixel one word is in width, but not how many ekstra folds there is in the different letters. I have attached a link, so you can see what's it about. So my question is. Can I make some kind of calculator in excel, that can tell me how many folds I need to make for each letter, so I can find a book with the right amount of sheets to do the folds. I'm not sure if all this make any sence, but feel free to ask questions.[URL="http://www.jeanniejeannie.com/2011/01/book-origami-the-art-of-folding-in/"] The pictures on that site shows words folded in book. Each folded sheet is one line/stribe in the letter.
Hope some one can help me.

**Kaper** · 12-13-2015, 12:52 PM

You need a list of how many pages you need for particular leter.
And then calculating total for given word would be pretty easy in Excel.
But to create this first list - it will be not so easy in excel, unless you have some kind of pixel font file in easy to read format (pixels as opposite to standard way of font representation - outlines).

**karina palm** · 12-13-2015, 01:02 PM

Hi Kaper.
Thanks for trying to help me.

I make my words in a program called print.net. There I can type my word in different fonts and creat the lines. Here is a link to a yotube video. The problem with the word she's using is, that there are only one level in each letter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uy1_N2Dkms. So I both needs to calculate letters and words. You say it's easy to do that in excel and I'm sitting here looking like a big ? Do you think, you can help me? I really hope so. I'm from Denmark btw, so if my english is poor and if I doesn't understand right away, please be patient with me.

**Richard Buttrey** · 12-13-2015, 01:08 PM

Hi,

And welcome to the forum,

What an interesting and unusual question. I'm not sure I fully understand the aim of the exercise but my first thought was that if you use a fixed width font like say courier, where all the letters are spaced the same distance apart then presumably you don't need to worry about the point size of letters.

I'd originally thought that the question was about making sure one letter only occupied the space of one fold width but then thinking a bit more about it if the fold is a clean tight fold then the width of the fold can be no more than twice the thickness of the paper, or perhaps marginally more if the fold is not really tight. In which case you'd be unlikely to see the whole width of a character unless it was an 'i', and normally you'd only see part of a letter.

And even if one character occupies the width of a fold you'd only see this if the paper is volded vertically. When the paper is folded at an angle then the letter itself, and probably only a proportion of the letter will be at an angle and not recognisable as a letter when viewed perpendicular to the page.

All of which tells you that I'm probably not really understanding the aim of the exercise but I'd be interested to hear more about what sort of calculations you are trying to make and perhaps with some examples. I realise it might be difficult to show examples but if you can clarify a little bit more what your goal is maybe we can assist further.

**karina palm** · 12-13-2015, 01:35 PM

Hi Richard. Thanks for the reply. I know it's a bit difficult to explain. I have made some links in the other posts but here is one more. Here you can see, how the sheets are folded. Just scroll down. She has also posted different alphabets to print out, but then you still have to count every single line of each letter so I was just thinking if excel maybe could do that. It's very frustrating to fold a word and the in the end, there is not enough sheets in the book to finish the word. Here's the link https://scrappystickyinkymess.wordpr...ith-templates/

**MarvinP** · 12-14-2015, 10:29 AM

Hi karina,

I too think this is an interesting problem. It seems to me you want to do something like the following.

1. Type some text that you want to fold into book pages.
2. Pick a font or character set that looks good
3. Map the font to where to fold the pages.

I propose using Word Art to select the font is what you want. NOW - the Pattern Fill in word art will show those vertical lines in the letters.
If you format the rows and columns in your Excel sheet to match the Pattern Fill of the word art this might be of great help.

See a partial solution. I haven't yet found a way to match the Pattern Fill (vertical lines in word art) to the column width. If there was an easy way to do this you might have your answer.

Any gurus know how to do this? See the attached with an attempt to pair column width with word art vertical pattern fill?