Checking Proofs

How much of a designer’s work consists of actual designing as opposed to meeting, doing paperwork, fiddling with FTP software, watching YouTube, organizing bloated font libraries, etc.? It depends on what kind of design you do, and what kind of place you work, but for most designers I’d guess that designing proper accounts for less than half of their time at work. Maybe less than a third. Of course, designers also tend to be constantly thinking about design, so you could say they’re designing around the clock; but while their heads are doing one thing, their hands are quite likely having to do another much less interesting thing.

For me, the bulk of my job consists of checking proofs. Not proofreading, which we hire someone to do, nor comparing old and new passes of a manuscript to make sure editorial corrections have been made correctly, which the production editor does, but checking for layout errors. There’s plenty of instruction on regular proofreading to be had (I recommend Mark My Words, if you want to go the book route; I’ve never taken a class in it myself, but I know many who’ve done so at NYU and the New School in NYC), but nobody’s ever told me how to check page layouts.

Well, not nobody. On my first or second day at this job, my teammate gave me a stack of manuscript and said to look for “weirdness.” That’s a bit vague for me, so in the past six months, I’ve come up with my own system:

Hello, my name is India, and I am a geek.

What the hell is that?

That is a (rather rumpled) genuine, real-world example of what I’m left with when I’ve finished checking a set of page proofs. The components are as follows:

• The tick marks and boxes along the left edge are for checking the chapter sinks. I line up the top of the paper with the crop marks on the proofs and use the marks to confirm that the chapter headings and first paragraph start at the same latitude in every chapter (if that’s the way it’s designed to be—in some books, such as the one whose comp order I posted, the first line is fixed but everything else lays where the Lord done flang it). The two horizontal lines mark the baseline and cap height of the chapter number; the three small boxes in the middle mark the x-height of the first three lines of text on the page. (Those bottom three are just to help me get the paper aligned; I don’t use them to check whether a page is running long or short. The compositor puts –1, 0, and +1 markers in the margin for the latter purpose.)

  It’s always been my understanding that the proofreader is supposed to do this, but it’s also always been my experience that they almost never do, unless they’re me. If you’re a book proofreader and you haven’t been checking sinks, consider yourself hereby schooled.

  Besides sinks, some other things I check for on chapter openers are capitalization, line breaks in long titles, and kerning around initial caps.

• The boxes along the bottom edge are for checking the space breaks. In this instance, the book had two kinds of space breaks: (a) a simple two-line break with the next paragraph starting flush left, and (b) a larger break using an ornament with uneven space above and below. I can eyeball a simple break of one to three lines, but for anything like the ornamented breaks in this book, I make a paper guide. Here, I lined up the top three boxes with the last three lines of text above the break. The middle box shows the height of the ornament; the last box marks the first line of text after the break.

• The columns of numbers indicate the pages where exciting stuff happens. The first three columns are mostly chapter numbers. (And that “Book J” is actually “Book I”; these are for my eyes only, so they’re messy.) The last column catalogues the two kinds of space breaks.

  Why in tarnation do I do this?

  This book is 544 pages long. If I notice on page 403 that there’s something wrong with the way the chapter opening was handled—for example, the first three words are in even small caps instead of cap+small caps—and I realize that I haven’t been consciously checking the capitalization on the openers, I don’t want to have to page back through the entire stack to recheck just the chapter openers. I can flip to just the pages I need to review. Same thing on the space breaks—many times, I’ve gotten nearly to the end of the book before I’ve realized that some of the space breaks begin one way and some begin another way. The task is tedious enough without having to do it over again.

• At the bottom, the “PE: 334, 403” denotes two printer’s errors that I found. All this, for two lousy errors! But nobody else spotted them (by the time these proofs came to me, they had been read by the author and an outside proofreader, and also checked by the production editor), so it’s a good thing I did. (The first one’s in brown pencil because I switched writing implements to mark the error on the proof and then forgot to switch back; it’s not a seekrit code.)

Not shown here is the fact that I probably also paged through the manuscript a second time to check the page lengths, using the compositor’s –1, 0, and +1 markers as a guide. The compositor often has to run pages long or short to make things fit, and to give priority to other rules of good composition. On most of our designs, we allow them to run one line short; on a few, we also permit them to run one line long. They’re not supposed to do either for more than six pages in succession, and the pages on a spread must always match—no –1 on the left side and zero or +1 on the right. So I whisk through the proofs looking for mismatches. It’s very, very rare for our compositor to screw this up, however (I believe they have a Quark XTension that checks it for them)—I’ve caught only one such violation since I’ve been at this job, and even that was a defensible one—so when I’m pressed for time, I skip this step. With other compositors, though, I’d check more regularly. This is another thing the outside proofreader is supposed to do.

Also not shown is the fact that I read each frontmatter page and held it against the corresponding printout of the sample page, to check position and style.

And, finally, I pulled one full-length recto page with no corrections on it, drew the page trim lines on with a ruler, and measured the margins and number of lines of the page. We perform this voodoo on each pass, even though the measurements almost never change after the first set of proofs. But don’t scoff—at my last job, we got a book all the way to the printer before anybody noticed I’d made it the wrong trim size. Oops.

This was a simple design, and the fifth or sixth book in a series, so the proofs were pretty clean and there wasn’t much to look for. On some books there are a lot more elements to check—epigraphs, different kinds of extracts, multiple levels of headings, etc. Fortunately, most of our books are shorter than this (though a few are much longer).

Note that I do not compare the two sets of pages—manuscript with first pass, first pass with second pass, etc.—to each other, unless I spot “weirdness” or can’t remember what I asked to have corrected on an earlier pass. I used to do this, when I started the job, but both the proofreader and the PE do it for their own nefarious purposes, and I’ve found that the foul copy rarely tells me anything so useful as to make it worth flipping through. Also, since I’ve already performed a very similar obsessive cataloguing process on the manuscript before designing it, I have a good sense of what kinds of goofs I’m looking for.

It’s tedious. But every so often I find a real set of doozies while performing this ritual, and those horrific errors make it all worthwhile. :) Also, quite often while poring over the manuscript trying very hard not to read it, I spot editorial errors which I then flag for the production editor. On a few occasions, I’ve suggested that they remove a particularly inattentive proofreader from the pool. (I don’t know if they’ve followed my advice, but I’m pretty sure I would—a good proofreader is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but a bad one is worse than no proofreader at all. If you’re a freelance proofreader who’s not sure why you haven’t received a call from such-and-such publisher in a while, you may want to reread CMS—especially chapter 3—and brush up on your skills. Most PEs won’t tell you you’re not going to be hired again, or what you missed; they just won’t call. Life’s too short.)

So that’s how I check proofs. It’s boring, and I get easily distracted while doing it, so it typically takes me at least an hour for a book of more than two hundred pages.

Does anybody else have to do this at his or her job? How do you go about it?