Preparing a Manuscript for Production

I’m sometimes asked—though perhaps not often enough—how best to prepare a manuscript for production. For every compositor you ask, you’ll get a different answer, but here are some general dos and don’ts that help make my production process go more smoothly.

1. First and foremost, make sure that the manuscript files include only and exactly the characters that are necessary to produce the book. Only because “invisible” content that slips through can wreak havoc on text when it’s flowed in. Most commonly, I find extra spaces, tabs, and other white spaces in documents, and those should be removed to boost the chances of clean, well-behaved pages. I sometimes also pick up stray text that is nowhere to be seen in the manuscript file. Usually that comes up when an author has typed text into a box and then either closed up the box’s bottom window shade or drawn a white box over the unwanted content to mask it out. It’s always a good idea to review your manuscript files with invisibles—non-printing characters, text boundaries, image placeholder, etc.—turned on. Exactly because efficient comps generally don’t read manuscripts character by character and can easily miss things like diacriticals that are inserted incorrectly. Current versions of Times New Roman include full alphabets—including accented characters and variant forms—for the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew scripts. Arial Unicode MS includes even more scripts like Bengali, Thai, and even the scripts used for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. There’s no longer a need to key, for example, a lower case “g” followed by a caron thinking that the comp will just kern the two together in pages so that they look like a single glyph. Instead, you can—and should—key the character that Unicode identifies as “Latin Small Letter G with Caron” or “U+01E7.” Similarly, it’s just as important to recognize that an en-dash and a minus sign are different characters and that Unicode provides separate ways to key them (“U+2013” and “U+2212,” respectively). If you don’t know how to find the character you need or how to key it in once you find it, contact your compositor for help.
2. If you embed instructions to the compositor (if you’re working on a manuscript with figures, you will probably have to), avoid keying them in the middle of paragraphs. Because compositors don’t read a manuscript character by character, it’s likely that they’ll miss an instruction to “<insert Navajo letter ‘yaq’ here>.” If they don’t catch it, your instruction will show up in pages and cost the client a correction charge. Rather, key compositor instructions in paragraphs of their own either before or after the paragraph to which they apply (and be consistent where you decide to insert them).
3. Turn off “Track changes” and remove Word comments. If a comp doesn’t catch that your manuscript file includes comments and unapproved corrections, the content of the comments and corrections will make it into the page layout program. Often, they’re buried in the middle of paragraphs and don’t get spotted until the pages are proofed.
4. Insert tags at the beginnings of paragraphs that are likely to be mis-styled in the absence of formatting. For example, an extract probably looks just like regular text if it’s not indented in Word. If you begin the extract with “<EX>,” it will be clear to the comp what you want the text to look like. You should also indicate when such elements end. A callout like “<Extract ends here>” in its own paragraph following the extract is sufficient. Heads are common elements that can be easily misstyled by a comp if they’re left untagged, so you should always tag the heads in a manuscript. Elements like bulleted and numbered lists are usually self-evident and need not be tagged, but most comps appreciate a callout indicating where the lists begin and end.
5. Unless the press or your comp specifically asks you to do so, don’t bother putting closing tags at the end of paragraphs. In the age of HTML and XML, it’s tempting to key something like this:
    
   <H1>Marco Polo’s “Discovery” of China</H1>
    
   The “</H1>” is not needed by most page-layout software that your compositor is likely to be using. After you’ve spent time putting the closing tags in, your comp will likely spend his or her time taking them back out. And if they’re miskeyed—as they frequently are—they won’t do anyone any good, anyway.

There are any number of other tips that I could offer, but these are the biggies. You can always contact me if you have a question about how to handle an element in your manuscript.