Tips for working with a compositor

William Stallings, author of 10 books including Computer Organization and Architecture, a three time winner of a Texty Award, and Local and Metropolitan Networks, winner of a 2001 McGuffey award, shares the following tips for working with a compositor (the person who sets the book's type):

• Include a supplemental Style Sheet (in addition to the one provided by the publisher) to the compositor that includes things that you think improve the appearance of the book (e.g., capitalize the first and only the first letter of ALL words in figure captions and table captions except conjunctions, prepositions, articles, etc.; for bulleted items that begin with a word or phrase, use bold rather than italic; etc.)

• Request a hard copy of the first set of page proofs. The compositor may provide these in hard copy or PDF files, but it's far easier to work with the hard copy, he says: "You can sit down and read them more easily in a comfortable chair and comfortable position than on a screen."

• Don't be tempted to skim the page proofs. It doesn't matter that the compositor is working from an electronic file that you supplied; 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," he says. "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."

• Make sure the page proofs are complete before beginning to read them. "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," he says. "It seems very unlikely that this will happen but it has happened to me a few times that the compositor has dropped an entire paragraph. On one occasion, the compositor interchanged two pages!"

• Read 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," he says.

• Make sure mathematical symbols, such as Greek letters or the multiply sign, are correctly reproduced.

• To track the compositor's second set of proofs, which incorporate your corrections, request two hard copies of the first set of page proofs, sending one marked up copy back and retaining the other copy, with the same markups. "I also make a list of page numbers that have corrections," he says. "That makes it easier for me to verify that the corrections were made. For this second set, PDF files are okay."