For “So You Want to Publish a Book?” (2020), I interviewed Meredith Pangrace, who is responsible for most of the typesetting of Belt’s beautiful books. Here’s an excerpt:
Wow, this is super interesting! I'd love to learn more about other aspects of the book making process. I also loved your fairly recent posts about proofreading and copyediting.
LOL on "typesetting poetry"!! But, we readers are very grateful someone is paying attention to all those fine points; nothing quite like white space on a page.
Maybe it's not possible to have a reply to an archive post, but after reading this detailed description (fascinating!), I'm wondering about all the checking and double-checking and triple-checking -- "I can hit one key and make everything change."
After making even one change, do you go back through the file to see if that changed anything? Or do you change everything that needs to be changed on a single pass through? And then go back and see what happened? How many rounds of iteration do you need to be sure you've corrected everything from the author and corrected everything from your changes?
Wow, this is super interesting! I'd love to learn more about other aspects of the book making process. I also loved your fairly recent posts about proofreading and copyediting.
LOL on "typesetting poetry"!! But, we readers are very grateful someone is paying attention to all those fine points; nothing quite like white space on a page.
Maybe it's not possible to have a reply to an archive post, but after reading this detailed description (fascinating!), I'm wondering about all the checking and double-checking and triple-checking -- "I can hit one key and make everything change."
After making even one change, do you go back through the file to see if that changed anything? Or do you change everything that needs to be changed on a single pass through? And then go back and see what happened? How many rounds of iteration do you need to be sure you've corrected everything from the author and corrected everything from your changes?
Good question.
Just wanted to say I loved this interview, fascinating !