I aim my eyes at the three-o'clock position and maker a clockwise scan on each page, but do what works best for you.
Check your book for these bloopers:
- Wrong fonts, particularly when text is pasted-in from another source
- Commas that should be periods--and vice-versa
- Straight punctuation that should be curly "typographers' marks"
- Curlies that curl in the wrong direction
- Missing spaces between paragraphs or sections
- Bad justification in the last line of a page
- Chopped-off descenders where you decreased line spacing or if the bottom of a text box is too close to the text
- Wrong-size bullets
- Rivers
- Too-big word spacing
- Normal letters that should be ligatures (more for large type than in body text).
- Accidental spaces after bullets
- Improper hyphenation
- Roman text that should be italic, and vice-versa
- Ignoring highlighted warnings in MS Word.
- Automatically accepting MS Word suggestions
- Gray text that should be black.
- Insufficient space adjacent to images
- Images or text boxes that floated over the margin.
- Images or text boxes that "slid' down and covered up footers
- Missing periods at sentence ends
- Missing opening or closing quote marks.
- Periods that should be inside a closing parentheses--or outside.
- Repeated words caught by the software
- Wrong headers, missing headers, switched verso and recto headers
- Subheads that are too close to the text above and too far from the text below
- Too much space between lines in a multi-line title, chapter name or subhead
- Pages with numbers that should not show nunbers ("blind folios")
- Words that shifted from the bottom of one page to the top of the next page
- And one that does require reading: chapter names in the table of contents that don't reflect a change made in the actual chapter
- And another: a topic not in the index because you added something after completing the index
This is a great list, Michael. It would be useful for anyone doing their own book production.
ReplyDeleteGuilty as charged. Keeping this for my new dog book!
ReplyDeleteI have trouble putting my comas, errr, commas, in the right place.
To Unfaithful:
ReplyDelete#12 happened with your name on my "thanks" page in the book you made me write.
Thanks Michael! A great list.. sharing on
ReplyDeleteCollaborate, Create, Publish
Very useful list, thank you. What are rivers?
ReplyDeleteFantastic list, thank you. Just came a bit too late! Seems the biggest problem is that as you fix one thing it can cause another to go awry. I noticed several months after publication that every second page number was missing. How did that happen? Messing about with sections I think.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, what are rivers?
Johanna