7 tips for working with a compositor
By William Stallings

1. The publisher will typically provide the compositor with a Style Sheet covering word usage, formatting, and other matters related to the physical appearance of the book. I always include a supplemental Style Sheet for certain matters that I think improve the appearance of the book. For example:

• Reproduce all tables exactly as shown; do not eliminate any of the horizontal or vertical lines. (Compositors have a tendency to remove lines they think unnecessary but which I think add to readability.)

• Bulleted items that begin with a word or phrase: use bold rather than italic. (Bold is easier to read than italic)

• For a numbered list, use boldface numbers followed by a period. (Adds a bit of interest to the page)

2. For the first set of page proofs, the compositor may either provide hard copy or PDF files. It is far easier to work with the hard copy. You can sit down and read them more easily in a comfortable chair and comfortable position rather than on a screen.

3. After all the effort to write the book, it is tempting to skim the page proofs. After all, the compositor is working from an electronic file that you supplied, right? Doesn't matter. Typos and other errors have a way of creeping in. Also, you might have missed some errors in the manuscript that you submitted to the compositor. You must force yourself to take the time to actually read, word for word, the entire set of pages. I find this the most painful and tedious part of writing the book - you are anxious to finish the job and you have read this stuff before. Also, don't try to read too many pages at one sitting. After a few dozen pages, I can no longer concentrate well enough to spot errors.

4. Before beginning to read the page proofs, make sure they are complete. I have a final printout of each chapter from my word processing program and I do a paragraph-by-paragraph comparison of the page proofs to the word processing document to make sure that no paragraphs have been dropped. It seems very unlikely that this will happen but it has happened to me a few times that the compositor dropped an entire paragraph. On one occasion, the compositor interchanged two pages! So this tedious first step must be done before sitting down to read the page proofs.

5. Also, go through the page proofs to make sure that no figures or tables are missing and that all captions are present. I have on a number of occasions spotted a missing caption.

6. If there is mathematical material, and you use Greek letters or other symbols, such as the multiply sign, you need to check carefully that these are correctly reproduced. I have sometimes had the experience that the compositor has trouble with the Symbol font.

7. Typically, the compositor will then provide a second set of proofs, which are supposed to incorporate your corrections. To track these, I request two hard copies of the first set of page proofs, send one marked up copy back and retain the other copy, with the same markups. I also make a list of page numbers that have corrections. That makes it easy for me to verify that the corrections were made. For this second set, PDF files are OK.

Dr. William Stallings is author of over a dozen titles (and numerous editions) in computer security, data communications, and other computer science topics. His home in cyberspace is WilliamStallings.com.