Category: Tools

I just had a long back-and-forth with a production editor who was making the final corrections to a nonfiction manuscript with lots of notes. When she mentioned that she was “reorganizing” the footnotes, which I took to mean cutting them out and pasting them into a separate document, I immediately wrote back to say that

I’d kind of rather if you didn’t move the footnotes, though I appreciate the sentiment, of course, as the coder-to-be. They need to be converted to endnotes, sure, but that’s a global command in Word. And I’ll wrangle them further using my top-secret note-stripping weapon, known as NoteStripper. Moving them manually tends to lead to corruption, hair-pulling, and woe.

And then she wrote back,

That’s the thing, India, I think this book has footnotes AND endnotes. I will confirm with editor…

And then I wrote back, even more apprehensive,

Well, if the footnotes are to stay footnotes and the endnotes are to stay endnotes, then *especially* don’t move the footnotes. I’m using InDesign CS2, which is perfectly capable of setting embedded footnotes.

And then she sent me the file and wrote,

The editor now tells me the endnotes REPLACE the footnotes, and the author just could not figure out how to delete the embedded footnotes (and, alas, neither can I).

Aha. This is a common problem authors have, and in trying to get around it they tend to make everything worse—utterly breaking the embedded notes and making them a nightmare to set. Perhaps you are ignorant in this matter, as well? Just in case, I present, dear reader, my final volley: Continue reading “Footnotes, Endnotes—Let's call the whole thing off!” →

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” →