Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animal on the cover of Word 2000 in a Nutshell is a parakeet. The name "parakeet" is commonly applied to many small, colorful species of parrots that inhabit warm regions of the globe including tropical America, Australia and the Pacific, Southeast Asia, India, and Sri Lanka.
Parakeets range in size from about seven inches to two feet, and are found in many basic and hybrid colors. In the wild, parakeets are highly active birds that feed on seeds and travel in flocks, sometimes inflicting heavy damage on fields. The Carolina parakeet, the only parakeet native to the United States, became extinct in 1918, partly because it was hunted down as a scavenger of fruit crops.
Many kinds of parakeets are kept as pets, the most common being the shell parakeet, or Australian budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus). The name "budgerigar" is derived from an Australian aboriginal term meaning "good food." Budgerigars average seven to eight inches in length, and weigh about one ounce. They are often green in color and have yellow heads marked with bars and cheek spots. Males and females are similar in appearance, but may be distinguished by the color of the cere, the area above the nostrils, which is often blue in males and brownish in females.
As pets, parakeets need large cages and frequent friendly attention to become happily domesticated. With enough encouragement, some parakeets are able to mimic human speech, very occasionally mastering large vocabularies. Domestic parakeets generally live for eight to ten years, but have been known to survive as long as twenty-five years. Madeleine Newell was the production editor and copyeditor for Word 2000 in a Nutshell. Colleen Gorman and Nancy Kotary provided quality control. Mary Sheehan provided production support. Brenda Miller wrote the index.
Hanna Dyer designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. Emma Colby produced the cover layout with QuarkXress 4.1 using Adobe's ITC Garamond font. Alicia Cech designed the interior layout for this book, and Mike Sierra implemented the design in FrameMaker 5.5.6. The text font is Adobe Garamond and the heading font is ITC Franklin Gothic. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano and Rhon Porter using Macromedia FreeHand 8 and Adobe Photoshop 5. This colophon was written by Madeleine Newell.
Whenever possible, our books use RepKover, a durable and flexible lay-flat binding. If the page count exceeds RepKover's limit, perfect binding is used.
