Peg, I don't suppose you could send me a copy of that old message? Yahoo Groups won't let me see it.
I got here from another weblog that said you'd written an entry about how bad copyediting can be. I imagined I'd get here to find you doing the canonical Bad Copyediting Rant (including such popular arias as "I'm going to have it written into my contract that this person NEVER TOUCHES MY WORK AGAIN"); but no, it was a decent copyedit and you're just describing the text production cycle.
J. K. Rowling substituting "mother" for "father" is the easiest kind of typo to make: grammatical, not obviously illogical, and the swapped words are a closely associated pair.
You're the only person I've ever heard of who reads their copyedit backwards. I check blues upside-down because I'm looking for image quality, not textual accuracy, but that's a different thing altogether.
About spaces and unfamiliar fonts: Unless the typesetter is cheesebrained, they won't insert an additional space where one already exists because doing that will mess up the spacing. When I'm converting an author's text to justified type, one of the first things I do is run a universal search-and-replace to change double spaces into singles. If you think there may be too much space but you're not sure, lightly circle the space, write "tighten" in the margin next to it, and circle the word "tighten". If there's an extra space, they'll take it out. If there's excess space for some other reason, they'll address it. If it's just the font, they'll figure you don't know what you're saying, and will let it stand as set.
Mindless spellchecker changes are the very devil. One of Greg Bear's novels had "causal" changed to "casual" throughout. My very favorite spellchecker alteration was "Eggplant Paramecium", which Robert Legault observed in the wild, on a NYC restaurant menu.
Shall I add a production lamentation to your list? NESFA Press just put the third edition of Making Book into print. At the last minute, they grabbed the wrong book to shoot from, using the error-ridden first edition rather than the corrected second edition. This is especially painful given how many of the book's fans are copyeditors. My agent is talking to NESFA Press about doing an errata sheet. Woe.
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Date: 2004-02-04 06:26 pm (UTC)I got here from another weblog that said you'd written an entry about how bad copyediting can be. I imagined I'd get here to find you doing the canonical Bad Copyediting Rant (including such popular arias as "I'm going to have it written into my contract that this person NEVER TOUCHES MY WORK AGAIN"); but no, it was a decent copyedit and you're just describing the text production cycle.
J. K. Rowling substituting "mother" for "father" is the easiest kind of typo to make: grammatical, not obviously illogical, and the swapped words are a closely associated pair.
You're the only person I've ever heard of who reads their copyedit backwards. I check blues upside-down because I'm looking for image quality, not textual accuracy, but that's a different thing altogether.
About spaces and unfamiliar fonts: Unless the typesetter is cheesebrained, they won't insert an additional space where one already exists because doing that will mess up the spacing. When I'm converting an author's text to justified type, one of the first things I do is run a universal search-and-replace to change double spaces into singles. If you think there may be too much space but you're not sure, lightly circle the space, write "tighten" in the margin next to it, and circle the word "tighten". If there's an extra space, they'll take it out. If there's excess space for some other reason, they'll address it. If it's just the font, they'll figure you don't know what you're saying, and will let it stand as set.
Mindless spellchecker changes are the very devil. One of Greg Bear's novels had "causal" changed to "casual" throughout. My very favorite spellchecker alteration was "Eggplant Paramecium", which Robert Legault observed in the wild, on a NYC restaurant menu.
Shall I add a production lamentation to your list? NESFA Press just put the third edition of Making Book into print. At the last minute, they grabbed the wrong book to shoot from, using the error-ridden first edition rather than the corrected second edition. This is especially painful given how many of the book's fans are copyeditors. My agent is talking to NESFA Press about doing an errata sheet. Woe.