Takes a bit to do this. It’s not like reading. You have to be alert for stupid periods where they don’t belong, the global decision to capitalize every word that follows a colon, the indecision on when Cook (a specific man) should be capped…I tell you, it’s amazing what a typesetter can do that’s new.
I've been locked in the galleys…
by CJ | Jan 20, 2011 | Journal | 11 comments
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That rumbling noise you hear is the giant bald dude flailing rhythmically on his kettle drum. Just so’s you keep up the pace… 😀
As a former typesetter, proofreader, and chief cook and bottle washer, because it was a small business, I can say it’s really amazing what other typesetters can do. It’s also pretty bizarre what some programs can do these days to mess with people’s work. Auto-replace and auto-correct…eek. When I write, these days, if some of those “helpful features” aren’t turned off, things can get…annoying or incorrect very fast.
In other words, my sympathies. A few hundred pages of galley text, whew.
Maybe you can get that big, bald drummer dude to play something catchy. I’d suggest hiring a rather more athletic drummer, but that could rather interfere with those galleys. Or not.
Have fun with the galley editing.
Oh god yes.
I rather feel that Microsoft Word, while some of it’s features are entertaining at best, is evil and must be destroyed for the good of mankind before it takes over the world along with the cows and the cockroaches.
That said, I haven’t been able to be on here and comment on all the tasty postings because I was dealing with my recent tentative diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome/Seasonal-Affective Disorder/Auditory Processing Deficit/Generalized Anxiety Disorder/Mood Disorder and possible Bipolar Disorder. Plus the creepy counselors were pushing me into SSI before any real treatment had taken place… so we left that place and will look for something else soon. Eek. Um, that was probably too much information, but I’ve not felt well -partially because of that- and between that and the oodles of snow, it has truly been like being locked away. I haven’t even felt like finishing any of the 20 or so fanfictions I need to finish. My poor readers! Eek! Anyway, I hope I haven’t usurped anyone’s thread being so impulsive like this. I’m glad you got it done, CJ! A Typesetter, huh? That’s pretty sweet. I wish I had an old-style typewriter, an Underwood, hopefully! But My fingertips sometimes pain me, so maybe not. Still, it would be great vintage fun! I hope no one’s gotten ill because of the winter…
… dang it I put an apostrophe in the possessive its! Somebody kill me now please. Eek.
Got it finished! Now we see if NYC can cope with a pdf and stickies. I can convert it or enter it onto paper, but I’d rather not!
That was around 300 pages with at least one mistake per page, dropped text, global errors: I’d say a very generous 5% were from my original script, and all the rest were typesetting errors.
Sigh. You give a typesetter a perfect script, and they go weird. My favorite was one of Jane’s, which came back with Spanish question marks.
Spanish question marks! hee hee hee
I love those. I find them fascinating. Does anyone else have an unholy fondness for odd punctuation and symbols?
NYC got it, and it seems to be good. Yes!
That’s fantastic. Quick, too.
I can recall one program or version that would use what looked like a Spanish inverted question mark when there was an unrecognized special character (glyph). But heh, although it would surprise me to find a typesetter had inexplicably added a “real” open question mark, things like that get done. Then again, the conversion to PDF might do something odd. Or if one or another word processor has decided a given word or phrase or passage is in, oh, French, Spanish, etc., instead of English, because word processors (and PDFs) and web pages have trouble recognizing words as English versus non-English versus new or alien words, then that could throw in a monkey wrench. (Darn those mahen dockworkers, and it’s not even a mahen story!) Heh, technically, HTML does have a way to tag text as “alien language;” I’ll need to double-check the lang property values. (It is “x-” something or other.) That’s probably guaranteed not to exist even, to the word processor.
Why someone would purposefully add things to a manuscript, though, when the author clearly didn’t intend that…. I didn’t do novel proofing and editing for a publishing house or professionally. However, one of the first rules we both went by was, correct for the obvious typos, proper English, proper typographical characters, and so on. If there was a question of wording or intent or style, then flag it and ask the client. Never just add something arbitrarily, and be prepared to defend your reasoning in editing for typography, grammar, and style. A “house style” does make sense, but there can be good reasons an author needs to “break” the “rules.”
Most particularly, science fiction, like poetry or like foreign language, is an art unto itself. Anyone who is going to typeset, proof, edit, layout, or design for a science fiction or fantasy piece really needs to understand something about the genre. There are alien words and made-up jargon. There are stylistic and typographical distinctions; telepathy, for instance. ** Throws up hands. Young whippersnappers! Why, in my day…! ** (…BCS, you’re only 44…)
Hmm, an item or two needing a fix per page would not surprise me. That’s a low correction rate for a draft manuscript. But when the author is *good* at grammar and spelling, a trained linguist, and that same author sees the typesetter has *added* or changed those for unapparent reasons, eek. If several (many?) of those were correct to start with, someone at the publisher might need to know their typesetter (or whoever it was along the path) has an above-average error rate, or an above-average ego/control issue. Heh, granted, a good editor and author need healthy egos, but good judgment and cooperation are keys.
Ahem. Serves me right for talking shop. Just ignore the high-falutin’ opinions from this side of the desk. 🙂 Or enjoy the commiseration.
LOL, anyway, here’s to success with the galleys.
My top, “What the frell?” moment recently with purchased ebooks, though, was when I bought (at very low price) an ebook of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Sur la démocratie en Amérique (in French, obviously) because I wanted the practice reading in college-level French. However, the particular ebook had been entered (probably scanned via OCR) and all the accent marks were missing. After a number of pages, I gave up in disgust. These days, there is no reason for common accent marks to be missing. Yes, really, all of them, lowercase/minuscules and uppercase/majuscules both; never mind the rules of French accents for upper versus lower, they were all missing. Someone was hoping to make a quick buck…or franc…ou centime ou sous. Sans sous, ci; ou sans sous là …. Eh bien…. — So I will be checking elsewhere for a copy in correct French.
Dunno if Gutenberg has non-English, but they might.
Oops, I misspoke. It was not De la démocratie en Amérique par Alexis de Tocqueville. Rather, it was Les trois mousquetaires par Alexandre Dumas père, notez bien, publié/imprimé par LeClue, which lacked the proper accent marks. I’ve purchased another version of the latter, publ. by Classiques Alcyoniens, and I had left a comment before in the LeClue edition, warning of the missing accents. The prices were negligible. Not free, but under a dollar. In order to find those, I had to search for the French titles. I have since found that if you go to Amazon (the US site) and click to their Kindle Store, among the left hand links are “Foreign Language eBooks,” which takes you to a page for (so far) Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese, but does not yet list other languages. Whether the Amazon.co.fr (French site) offers books for US readers in French or English, I have not checked. I just thought readers here would appreciate my correction and the info. Project Gutenberg does offer some foreign language titles in the public domain.