Manuscripts: Saving Time and Money 3
This is the third installment in a series of posts suggesting ways authors and small publishers can save headaches, time, and money at the manuscript stage. We’ve already talked about working with coauthors, using standard style manuals, and processing words like a pro. Now let’s discuss…
Images, Tables, and Textboxes
Please. Please, please, please DON’T embed these in the manuscript!
Tables, images, and textboxes do not just pop into InDesign or Quark. The graphic artist needs to place them, one by one, into the layout in the appropriate places.
If that’s not a good enough reason for you, here’s what happened when one author got fancy with tables:
At 1:30 one morning, I finally finished a perfectly awful amateur manuscript produced by one of my clients. Eager to get the work, when I quoted my page rate I hadn’t looked carefully at his “tables,” most of which were jury-rigged with tabs and hard returns, nor had I realized that half the copy consisted of these fake tables, because he hadn’t numbered them. The manuscript contained a good two dozen of them. One actually had been created in Word’s table function, but then somehow he’d embedded a graphic inside the table. Another was a table stuck inside a textbox, which I could not remove from the copy no matter how hard I tried. A third was a table over which the author had superimposed a text box, apparently unaware that he could merge cells to create a space in which to enter the paragraph he stuck there.
Because he was trying to do the page layout himself in Word—this document was a book accompanying a course in personal finance he was peddling, and he intended to have it printed at a KwikCopy—I converted his tab-and-return monstrosities into tables, cleaned up the real tables, and left them embedded in the edited file.
What a mess! It took hours and hours and HOURS to untangle, and by the time I finished, the $4.50/page quote I’d given him stuck me with an hourly rate of about three bucks. Finally, on the fourth night that I’d spent working until I couldn’t hold my eyes open another minute, I was about to wrap the job up…and Word hung. I managed to save the file and shut down the computer, and then I stumbled off to bed.
The next morning when I opened it to add a few finishing touches before sending it and my puny bill to the author, what should come up but an error message: “A table in this document has become corrupted. To recover the contents of the table: select the table and choose Convert Table to Text from the Table menu.” (This strategy, BTW, converts your table, all right: into scrambled eggs!)
This problem was a known issue in MS Word 2002. I was using Word 2004 and so never had encountered it until his Word 2002 file came along. Nothing I tried would recover the file. Days of eye-glazing work had been lost. I did not get paid for my time and labor, and my client did not get his edited copy.
This was a direct result of embedding large numbers of complex tables in a Word file.
The solution is to create the tables in a separate word file—one file per table, preferably, each given an identifiable filename, such as “table 1.doc” or “Jones table 1.doc.” Format the table according to Chicago style (or whatever style you’re following) and give it a title. Here’s an example.
In the MS where you want the file to appear, enter a call-out to the layout artist, like this:
<COMP: Please insert Table 1 here>
You can boldface or highlight them as you like; the compositor (layout artist) will use the layout program’s search function to look for a symbol such as < to find them all, and so is unlikely to miss any. Where she or he finds a callout, she will place the appropriate table in the layout, using InDesign or Quark.
Do the same for material you would like to place in textboxes.
Do not, do not, do NOT stick textboxes in a Word document and then drop the thing on a layout artist! This creates headaches of migraine caliber. Just because Word will do something does not mean you should do it!
For textboxes, you can use a single file. Call it something like textboxes.doc, Jones textboxes.doc, or chapt 1 textboxes.doc. Do not place the copy inside textboxes in this file. Just type it, and number each blurb in the order in which you would like it to appear.
Textbox 1
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Etiam nunc. Donec consectetur ipsum nec est. Quisque at dolor.
Textbox 2
Nunc luctus risus in tortor. Vivamus tristique, lectus a pretium aliquet, felis mi lacinia erat, sagittis rhoncus metus arcu accumsan ligula.
Indicate in the copy approximately where you would like to place the textbox:
<COMP: Please place textbox 1 near here.>
Remember that unless you’re publishing in 8.5 x 11-inch format, the page size for your published document will be different from Word’s default page size. In any event, because the layout program’s font size and margins will be different, what you type in Word will not look identical when it’s laid out. So all your effort to trick out pages using Word’s bells and whistles will be just so much wasted time and energy.
Images and graphs need to be saved as JPEGS or PDFs, and absolutely positively NOT embedded in Word files! An embedded image is useless to a layout artist. These are not print-quality images, and they do not flow into page layout programs in any sane manner.
Handling images and graphs entails three steps:
1. Save the file as a JPEG or a PDF.
2. Write a caption and save it (with all the other captions) in a separate Word file.
3. Type a callout in the manuscript to tell the layout artist where you would like to place the image.
Give your JPEG an identifying name, numbered in the order in which it should appear. Images are called “figures.” Thus:
Figure 1.jpg
Jones Figure 1.jpg
Jones Chapt 1 Fig 1.jpg
Jones Fig 1.pdf
And thus:
Nunc luctus risus in tortor. Vivamus tristique, lectus a pretium aliquet, felis mi lacinia erat, sagittis rhoncus metus arcu accumsan ligula. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Curabitur commodo purus. Nam varius. Aenean id sem quis sem porttitor adipiscing. Suspendisse tempor elit ac mi.
<COMP: Please place Figure 1 near here.>
Aliquam scelerisque lacus placerat purus. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Quisque arcu. Vestibulum sit amet lorem. Nunc enim velit, placerat nec, fringilla vitae, elementum ac, arcu. Fusce mattis. Donec sodales. Donec augue tortor, pretium eu, posuere quis, volutpat non, nunc. Nullam varius dignissim nisl. Vivamus lobortis.
<COMP: Please place Figure 2 near here.>
Type all the captions in a separate file, in the order in which the images should appear, and clearly identify them:
Figure 1
Little League players at a public park in Cincinnati, 1951.
Figure 2
Like their big-league counterparts, Pop Warner teams had mascots, among them the Erewhon Lumberjacks’ Musky the Muskrat.
What You’ll Give the Publisher or Layout Artist:
So. When you finish compiling a manuscript that includes tables, pullouts (textboxes), and images, you’ll hand over a package for the layout artist that contains the following items:
The manuscript
Files containing the tables and their titles
Images and graphs formatted as JPEGs or PDFs
A file containing captions for the images and graphs.
This seems like a lot of trouble, eh? Well…trust me. It’s a LOT less trouble than a single Word file with all that stuff jumbled up in it. When someone else has to untangle the mess, the process is time-consuming and expensive (you, dear author, ultimately will pay for the time required), and the potential for error is hugely magnified.
Do it right the first time. Please.
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