It is you who decides the format of your book, after all. Perhaps you may have some instructions from your editor or another principal. Follow those instructions!
If you have never typeset a book before, take a look at the books in your bookcase. You will recognize that most of them have portrait format. Only very few books use the landscape format – these are mostly coffee-table books and children's books. Square (or almost square) books are rather uncommon, aside from the CD and DVD booklets used nowadays.
The portrait format has been proven over many centuries for many practical reasons. There are several criteria to define the page size of a book. You may e.g. not want to waste too much paper when producing the book in the printing house. Today small DIN formats like DIN A5 can be used for ideal books without wasting too much bleed paper offcuts. But the page aspect ratio of DIN page formats (1 to square root of 2) is not very esthetic. Books are felt to be beautiful when their page width is smaller than in the DIN page aspect ratio. DIN A5 page format is 14.8 x 21.0 cm. When you compare this format to those of your books, you will see smaller page formats in your bookcase. If you decrease the page width from 14.8 cm to e.g. 14.0 cm, you will increase the esthetic effect.
We will use this format (14.0 x 21.0 cm) in our next example. Feel free to repeat the example with other page formats. The principle will always stay the same.
Create a new document in iCalamus, using 2 pages, double page mode, first page is left page. The following dialog shows how best to adjust the parameters:
Then you will see your book displayed in a two pages view. Use a meaningful name to save it. (The following image shows the view of the whole assembly sheet. You will see the two pages in the center of the document, surrounded by the assembly sheet which doesn't play any role in this topic.)
