The Proofing Process…

What’s proofing? Well, first of all, different companies use that term in different ways. So when I use it here, I mean the process of looking at laid out PDFs one final time to find any last mistakes, with final changes then made directly in the laid out files before it heads to print.

Across five companies (and a variety of freelance things I’ve done), there’s been numerous processes for how that works. I think FASA had the most comprehensive process, where Editorial and Development would have several days’ worth of meetings (depending upon the size of the book), all with giant manuscripts and a million sticky notes and we’d carefully go through everything caught by anyone and we’d discuss whether a change needed to occur or not.

PDFs and a virtual company (which is basically Catalyst, with employees scattered across numerous states) have enabled a much different process, but one that’s evolved over time. Especially as our previous process really fell down last summer with Street Grimoire, we’ve built a new process. And so far the reviews on Run Faster seem to indicate that new process is working smoothly.

So in this post are three pages from the Bloody Business campaign book soon heading to print (the yellow highlights are where sticky notes are found; the suggested corrections from the proofer didn’t translate into the image, sorry about that). 

In a nutshell the PDF of a given section straight from Matt’s electronic-alchemical box of awesome is posted to an online thread where the various proofers and the line developer all have access. The PDF is then reviewed and comments are generated and posted from several proofers (the images here are just from one individual); some of those are in separate documents, but almost always they’re posted directly in the PDF.

Then, the line developer—in this case Jason Hardy—will carefully review all comments to see what is appropriate to change and what is not, and then folds all such changes directly into the laid out file using Adobe InCopy. Then, Matt goes back over it all one last time to ensure that no changes caused pagination issues (text pushed from one page to the next), or odd characters to pop up, and so on.

Then a final PDF is generated of the entire book, which everyone ‘pages’ through one last time to see if any last issues are spotted, then it’s off to the printer!

Now, just to type this since some may ask…even with the new process, errors get through. I’ve been a part of publishing literally hundreds of books at this point, and not a single one of them is perfect. We can improve and get better and come close…but the nature of the large and complex books we produce simply guarantees that ‘perfect’ remains elusive…but we sure do keep trying.

Randall