hapke@ccvaxa.UUCP (08/06/87)
Henry Spencer answers someone's question: > > ... So why do the copy > > editors waste their time adding printers marks to my manuscripts which > > are already correctly formatted with respect to boldface and italics? > > Probably because their typesetting people are *not* used to working from > multi-font documents, and the copy editors are (justifiably) worried that > this will introduce errors. This is a real and legitimate concern. Henry is absolutely correct. In a well-run typesetting office, the typesetter will stop the job and call in the copy editor if the printer's marks are NOT in the text. By and large, most authors are not good at determining when to use boldface, italic, etc. Even if the original poster did format the submission correctly, most authors don't. The typesetters know this and want to see the copy editor's marks. If you are producing text for publication on a computer, there are two ways to get the entire publishing and editorial staff to hate you. The first is to print everything on a dot matrix printer. The second is to submit fancy single-spaced TeX or troff output from your laser printer. Warren Hapke ...ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!hapke
patwood@unirot.UUCP (Patrick Wood) (08/12/87)
The third way to get everyone at the publisher mad at you is to do the typesetting yourself, submitting final, camera-ready copy for printing! Perhaps it makes them worry about their job security. Pat Wood
crm@duke.cs.duke.edu (Charlie Martin) (08/12/87)
Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.47.4 of Sun Aug 9 1987 on duke (berkeley-unix)
In article <267@unirot.UUCP> patwood@unirot.UUCP (Patrick Wood) writes:
Path: duke!mcnc!rutgers!unirot!patwood
From: patwood@unirot.UUCP (Patrick Wood)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Date: 12 Aug 87 02:27:06 GMT
Article-I.D.: unirot.267
Posted: Tue Aug 11 22:27:06 1987
References: <8373@utzoo.UUCP> <29400003@ccvaxa>
Reply-To: patwood@unirot.UUCP (Patrick Wood)
Organization: Public Access Unix, Piscataway NJ
Lines: 5
The third way to get everyone at the publisher mad at you is to do the
typesetting yourself, submitting final, camera-ready copy for printing!
Perhaps it makes them worry about their job security.
Pat Wood
I think the real reason camera-ready copy upsets most publishers is
like the reason David Steinberg once gave for being upset about
masturbation: not that it is being done, but that it is being done
*badly.*
At least with fiction, where payment is by the word, the reason for
non-typeset double spaced text for submission is (a) it is easier to see
the marks for composition into the house style than to catch all the
places where the font changes to double-ugly hungarian italic bold, and
(b) it is easy to calculate the word-count by multiplying the number of
pages by 250, which doesn't work with atypical kerned text.
--
Charlie Martin (crm@cs.duke.edu,mcnc!duke!crm) patwood@unirot.UUCP (Patrick Wood) (08/15/87)
Not all author-supplied camera-ready artwork is done poorly. We've been doing it for almost four years now (before "desktop publishing" was in vogue) and have been paid fairly well for it. We've been told by people at the publisher that we do better work than they can do in-house. The majority of work done by the author does leave much to be desired, either because the typesetting program used stinks, the author doesn't have a fine eye for layout or detail, the author gets carried away with fonts and point sizes, or simply due to lack of attention. We shouldn't generalize, just because a lot (or even the majority) of author-typeset books aren't very good. Just looking at Knuth's TeX and METAFONT books gives me hope that all is not lost. Pat Wood