# The look before and after: the full book's first pages, 00:30 and 09:55 UTC

> The look before and after: the full book's first pages, 00:30 and 09:55 UTC: a study for the editor, from team/conductor/research/2026-11-04__the-look-before-and-after/.

*Source: <https://the-ultimate-insider.book.sgit.ai/research/2026-11-04__the-look-before-and-after/index.html> · site v0.1.786 · generated from the same content as the page, so the two cannot drift.*

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Made by conductor@book.the-ultimate-insider, 4 November 2026, about 09:58 UTC, at the editor's ask (brief 26: "before you do any changes, can you see what I mean? ... From the first batch of pages, let's say there must 10 pages before and after"). Unlike the other studies here, this one is pictures: the point is how the pages look.

**Method.** Both PDFs built locally the same way as the site's full draft (`publishing/build_book.py --book manuscript/editions/rc2-150/Book.txt --cast --figures publishing/rc2-figures.json`, the signed cover and `lab/tools/book/speakers.css`): **before** from `dev` at `89bd8a50` (00:30 UTC, the version he liked), **now** from `dev` at 09:55 UTC. Pages rendered at 40 to 60 dpi; counts over pages 3 to 40 (cover and title page left out). The sheets show only pages already published on the site; the codes in them are chapter 3's public key QR codes, cleared by security (019), and one code inside the talk's policy-page screenshot on page 6 of the before version (the talk site's own published link to ruv.sgit's policy); at this size none is readable (the largest is about 22 px).

| Pages 3 to 40 | Before | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Pages more than 35% blank at the foot | 7 | 12 |
| Content width, share of the page | 86% | 81% |
| Ink, share of the page | 14.5% | 10.2% |
| Words | 15,512 | 9,888 |
| First page of the tour (screenshots, the dashboard) | 11 | 17 |

**What it shows** (the conductor's reading): the opening (pages 3 to 16) lost its visual rhythm: before, every page there had a visual (the printable Start here card, the speaker and slide drawing, the player and policy screenshots, the greyed cast cards, the tour); now the new introduction and chapter 1 come first as text, a "Try this" card sits alone on page 12 (with a stray "Dramatised" label above it), and the narrower measure leaves more white. From page 17 the new version is richer than before (the tour, the house, the day at a glance, the concept callouts, the agent cards).

**The sheets**
- `pages-01-16-before-after.png`: pages 1 to 16, before above, now below.
- `pages-03-08-close-up.png` and `pages-09-14-close-up.png`: closer, before above, now below.
- `pages-17-32-before-after.png`: pages 17 to 32.

The fixes were proposed to him as LY1 (book.json); he signed them at about 10:35 UTC (brief 27).

## After the first LY1 change (11:05 UTC)

Built the same way from `dev` at `4320725c`, after the publisher's LY1 change (the measure, screenshots beside their text, no holes) and before the writers' changes. Pages 3 to 40:

| | Before (00:30) | 09:55 | 11:05 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pages more than 35% blank at the foot | 7 | 12 | 10 |
| Content width, share of the page | 86% | 81% | 83% |
| Ink, share of the page | 14.5% | 10.2% | 10.8% |

Better, and still worse than the version he liked: the visuals the writers are putting back in 00 to 09 are not in yet. The publisher's own count (058) is over the whole book (22 such pages of 127, 7 of them inside a chapter), so its numbers differ from these by range, not by finding. `pages-01-16-three-builds.png`: pages 1 to 16 in the three builds, top to bottom.

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*[Site index for agents](../../llms.txt) · [HTML version](https://the-ultimate-insider.book.sgit.ai/research/2026-11-04__the-look-before-and-after/index.html)*