Comment by raddan
21 hours ago
> Overall, as a technical writeup I enjoyed the article; however, I would caution that the author seems to approach publishing from an amateur perspective.
I also worked at a publishing company (for ~6 years) in the early 2000s. While you are right that the pros have some tricks to make the process easier, the fact remains that the process is not easy at all. Unlike in academic publishing, where nothing stands between the author and the reader, at a commercial publishing company (at least one of the majors), there are legions of people working behind the scenes. Editors communicate with authors; editorial assistants help the editors with fact-checking, drafts, basic organization and comprehensibility; copyeditors get all pedantic about formatting and word choice (sometimes resulting in arguments with authors that the editors need to smooth over); production departments that make the books look pretty, contain images whose copyrights are cleared and that can be legibly printed within a reasonable budget; graphic designers who develop house styles or even a custom style for a book and even original cover art; lawyers who negotiate copyrights for excerpts, images, and other ancillary materials; and on and on.
I know all this because I worked on a custom content management system for this company and in so doing I discovered that the process was incredibly complex. One of the major pet peeves of everybody involved was when an author thought they were doing anybody a favor by trying format things in Microsoft Word. Most of that information was thrown away and the real layout was done by people who thought in terms of widows, orphans, kerning, and leading (and so on). Once you know what all the people in a top publishing company do, the difference between an amateur publication and a professional one becomes immediately apparent. So I don't fault the author for getting a bit technical. The SE approach sounds like an epic attempt to make a complicated subject at least somewhat approachable.
I did't know what widows and orphans are so I looked it up.
> Widow (sometimes called orphan)
> Orphan (sometimes called widow)
> Runt (sometimes called widow or orphan)
Yeah I'm glad we programmers are not the only ones bad at naming things...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans
I am firmly convinced that the customary mapping of widow/orphan is back to front. You’re really trying to convince me that the one that has been cut off from its antecedents is the widow? It should obviously be the orphan.
So, no wonder people confuse them, because the popular mapping is wrong.
> It should obviously be the orphan.
But it isn’t obvious that a line cut off from its descendants should be a widow, so that mapping isn’t ideal either.
I propose “bereaved” — a parent cut off from its children.
Yes! All the typographical techniques and terminology is fascinating (and confusing at times). Widow and orphan control really fight against text justification. Finding the right balance is tricky, but LaTeX has all the little knobs to tweak and find what's right for your uses (fiction for me).
> Once you know what all the people in a top publishing company do, the difference between an amateur publication and a professional one becomes immediately apparent.
Any advise for developing this sense?
I will never work in a top publishing company but I have been able to approximate good design by first studying the fundamentals, then reproducing the layouts I see in popular media. I can make text into a beautiful book, and I see poor design choices in the corporate communication billion dollar companies.
But it feels like there’s a lot more I don’t know, and you never know what you don’t know, and it makes me wish I could absorb more from working under an expert.
There's no substitute for apprenticeship (by whatever name). Unfortunately, skills of this kind may be close to extinction. For someone like you just interested in getting better at layout design, I'd recommend something like 'The Elements of Typographic Style', by Bringhurst; this concentrates mostly on books, but much applies to other layouts. Of more general interest -- i.e., beyond layout design -- might be 'An Encyclopedia of the Book', by Glaister. There's a wealth of valuable design and print resources from the '60s - '90s if you can find them -- some libraries still have high-quality examples, but most have replaced them with much less-valuable contemporary resources. Look for book and magazine sales by university departments, businesses, etc.
Thank you! I have been absorbing Bringhurst methodically the past year.
I had not heard of Glaister, will be on the lookout.
Good point about library and corporate sales. My main supply of materials from the 60s has been from estate sales -- not for instructional materials, but for well composed period pieces. Older letterfaces and color palettes are so evocative; seeing the label of a 70 year old oil can with so much more personality than the products of today makes me want to bottle this style for my own future use. And it feels good to hold something back from the landfill.
1 reply →
“A Few Notes on Book Design” is also worth a read.
https://texdoc.org/serve/memdesign/0
If you have a decent TeX distribution installed you have a copy for long flights.
The trouble with our age is that, despite the abundance of intermediate-level information, expert teachers in specific, and shrinking, professions are as hard as ever to access, if not more so.
Would just like to add that academic publishers have to deal with a lot of rubbish too.
Trying getting the psychology department to use anything other than O365. We have our own typesetting contractors who deal with the muck they produce.
When we get a Word doc from an author it is sent to the typesetter for reformatting. A standard set of style codes is applied and other corrections made so it can be directly imported into the design template. This the version the copyeditor works on. Also: once proofs are set this version is basically trash. In ye olde dayes, when this was all done on paper, the edited ms would eventually go back to the author, but sometimes they didn't want it. Now when the book is done the production manuscript files get deleted.
For ebook production, you could definitely do worse than follow Standard Ebooks' method. That will get you a decent standards-compliant file with basic accessibility features accounted for.
Maybe we worked at the same firm. You never know.
I worked at Bedford/St. Martin, now Macmillan Education. It would be hilarious if you worked there (or at our nemesis one floor down in the same building).