Author: India

PEs and EAs

India1 Comment

A former colleague who’s applying for an entry-level production editing job e-mailed yesterday with this inquiry about EAs and PEs:

Would you clear something up for me? I took their proofreading test, have to return it today, and don’t get something. The test consists of a setting manuscript (word doc marked up by the copyeditor) and corresponding first page proofs (no markings). Some of the copyeditor’s alterations are reflected in the proofs, some are not. There are also errors in the proofs which do not appear in the setting ms. The directions say to mark corrections as pe’s or ea’s, but my understanding from Chicago is that ea’s and aa’s are changes made to the proofs, therefore all discrepancies I find between the setting ms and the first page proofs would be pe’s. Or are pe’s only errors in the proofs which do not appear in the setting ms?

Did you follow that? I couldn’t. But I answered it anyway with the following tract, which I’m posting here in case anyone else out there is confused on this issue. And judging from the incorrectly marked up proofs I have to decipher from time to time, there are more than a few professional proofreaders who don’t quite get this concept: Continue reading “PEs and EAs” →

The Dictionary of Record

India2 Comments

A recent post at Heaneyland!, whose last few offerings had me gasping in great honks of laughter for more than a minute, reminds me that I’d like to make a qualified recommendation of the electronic version of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, aka the default dictionary of U.S. book publishing.

Recommended because it’s the default dictionary, and if you do anything related to book editing or production you should be in the habit of looking stuff up in it, and if you must look stuff up, it’s a lot faster to do so right on your computer than to have to get up from your desk, drag down the dead-tree version of what’s probably the previous edition of the dictionary, and thumb to the appropriate page. Continue reading “The Dictionary of Record” →

A satisfied customer!

India1 Comment

So yesterday afternoon I submitted sample pages for that puzzle book, and today I received an e-mail from the publisher saying the “design is drop-dead gorgeous . . . I think it’s lovely.” The author hasn’t seen it, though, and I had some queries about structural issues, so there may yet be changes. But I’ll post some samples eventually.

(It is perhaps appropriate to note at this point that as a designer of book interiors, I am totally in love with Amazon’s “Look/Search Inside the Book” feature, and I’m sure I’ll soon be just as enamored of Google Print. Why? Because each of these services makes it easier for me to find work I’ve done, even if I can’t remember that I did it. Copyright pages are almost always scanned, and that’s where my credit lines go; also, acknowledgment pages tend to get scanned, for those never-too-frequent occasions when one actually gets thanked in print.)

Update, 11/17: Confirmed: “design is way approved!”

Math into Type

India9 Comments

Maybe I should put some tape on the bridge of my glasses for this post, just as a precaution.

At my day job, I’m trying to come up for an interior design for this kind of freaky novel about puzzles. Or, rather, it’s a novel that is a puzzle. Or something like that. Each chapter contains problems to solve, and some of the problems are shaded in red (it’s four-color throughout—yow!), and if you solve all of those and send in your results, you get a prize. Legal details TK.

But that’s not the puzzle that concerns me.

No, the biggest problem I have to solve, aside from how to make this book look tasteful, is how to represent the inevitable mathy bits in InDesign. Because although we have a single license for an adequate if klugey math Xtension for Quark XPress 4 (in a five-typesetter shop, this frequently leads to exchanges like this: “I need the math.” “Okay, I’ll quit Quark in a sec.”), it’s my long-held policy to use InDesign whenever I can get away with it. In this case, I had already started setting up the book in InDesign when I noticed how much math it contained. Simple stacked fractions, sure, I can deal with those by hand, but square roots are a pain. And complex fractions, like

square root of<a href=1 over (x plus y))" width="54" height="46" />?

Forget it. Seek professional help.

Continue reading “Math into Type” →

  1. x times (y squared [↩]

Recommended: Editor's Toolkit Plus

India5 Comments

About four years ago, when I was living entirely off my freelance editorial income (which is to say, when I was living off my savings), I spent a month or two trying to keep up with the discussions at Copyediting-L. And while regularly reading this very busy listserv may cause insanity, I do still recommend taking it in small doses, if you’re at all interested in editing. Because no matter how good you think you are at English grammar, reading just a day’s worth of wrangling on CE-L will impress upon you how vast is the portion of that realm that you don’t know. Flexibility is important in copyediting and proofreading, and once you see how even a group of longtime professional editors can disagree on what may seem like the most fundamental “rules” to you, you’re more likely to remember to wield your pencil lightly when changing all those whiches to thats.

I no longer follow CE-L, because I have actual work to do nowadays, but it was while skimming that list that I kept coming across mentions of a site called Editorium.com. Probably people were discussing Word macros, or how to use the Track Changes feature, or something like that. Editorium has an excellent newsletter that gets into all the nitty gritty bits of MS Word that people who work on manuscripts need to know—how to keep the spelling checker from skipping certain words that are correctly spelled but often misused, for instance, or how to delete unused style sheets. If you use Word, you should subscribe; it’s great.

But when I visited the site, I found that the real mindblowing thing at Editorium.com is the software—complex collections of well thought-out and documented Word macros and scripts. It’s these I can’t live without, specifically a package called Editor’s Toolkit Plus. Whenever I have to reinstall Word on my computer, the second thing I do—after turning off practically everything under the Tools->AutoCorrect menu—is install Editor’s Toolkit. Whenever I go to a new day job, I plead until we buy a license. Because without ETK, Word to me seems broken.

Continue reading “Recommended: Editor's Toolkit Plus” →

Indexes, indices, indixes

IndiaLeave a comment

Okay, first off, here are the last two books I’ll ever index:

Appeal to Reason

History of African American Theatre

These happen also to be the only two books I’ve indexed. Professional indexers are special people, and I am not that kind of special.

Trivia:

  • Appeal to Reason, most of which I also typeset and the copyediting of which I supervised, had the cleanest manuscript I’ve ever seen, before or since. I kept saying, “We ought to send Craig [the editor] flowers.” We never did, but we did gush praise at him every time we spoke.
  • The manuscript for the History of African American Theatre was about seven inches high, and it was being copyedited while I wrote the index. Which meant that I had to look up which of the zillions of variants of all those titles and proper names and so forth were correct, and then e-mail them to the copyeditor. It was kind of insane; I thought I might die; I nearly died. The published index is forty-three pages, typeset. Also, I really don’t recommend compiling a large index using Excel. On the bright side, having obsessively fact-checked the index myself, I can now place reasonable trust in it as a fact-checking resource—I look up play titles and actors’ names in it all the time.

Hello, World

IndiaLeave a comment

I’m launching this blog as a place to post work-related stuff. It’ll mostly serve as an online portfolio so that when people Google me, they won’t just get hits that are seven or eight years old, but I promise also to post things of (slightly) more general interest–tools I’m using, design or reference books I’m reading, pictures of intriguing found text, books I consider pretty, etc.

Because it’s a professional blog, I will try not to swear or say “like” all the time, but don’t get your hopes too high.