to talk like a publisher

[calimac]

Here's a query for all those who write or edit academic or otherwise complex and precise texts:

If the author or editor submits to the publisher a formatted text, with the special fonts and the mathematical equations and the foreign-language quotes and all, laid out in the typeface and format it's to appear in print with, does the publisher ever strip out and/or change all that for the copyediting stage, so that it's "easier to read," with the intent of changing it all back later?

I'm told this is "common," but it's the first time I've seen it in 15 years of being a contributor and/or editor to books laid out and edited by computer.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I've known it done and I've seen the appalling results when they forget they've done it too.

Cough! Brill Publications! Cough!

Thank heavens for coming back to the writer before publication for corrections is all I have to say!

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I'm currently copy editing an economics paper with massive amounts of equations and the odd italic term (ceteris paribus and ex ante/ex post and so on). It was all provided to me just as the author submitted it. In fact I'm working on the TeX file, editing either the WYSIWIG view or the raw TeX code, whichever makes a particular change easier to define clearly. This is by far the easiest way to edit math-heavy text; I have another client that sends me chemistry papers with embedded math, and the math is hard to change and I make as few changes as possible—not usually changing numbers or variables, but adding punctuation at the end of displayed equations and so on—often by writing a note to the compositor.

I've never seen a publisher strip out math.

Still another client sends me books on humanistic subjects. They go through a standard preformatting process before they get to me, but the italics are left intact.

I've been doing this sort of work since about 1988, and I've been working mainly on computer files for about a decade. I think the publisher you're dealing with is being eccentric; it's not a practice I've ever seen.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

They're not stripping out textual data (I phrased ambiguously), but they are stripping out fonts and formatting. Small caps and the likes, and I think some italics, when indented quotes are all italics.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I was puzzled about that. Really you can't reformat math as text; you either leave it in as math, or delete it. Of course you can change the letter variables from roman to italic or vice versa, but then you may have an author who uses bold (for vectors), sans serif (for matrices), open face or "blackboard bold" (for sets of numbers), script, fraktur . . . and god help you if you change two of those to the same font, because the switching of fonts is a way of conveying meaning.

About all I normally do is change multiletter variables (like Re for Reynolds number) or subscripts that are abbreviations rather than indices or variables to roman type.

Indented quotes being italic seems really odd. It's redundant at best, if the quotes are already indented, and I think it would be harder to read a big block of italic type.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

There are occasions when blocks of text are in italics for technical reasons. Or smaller bits of text in italics: same principle applies. And yes, as you say, sometimes font conveys meaning. Italics certainly does: even in a simple textual case, it can convey "emphasis" or "book title".

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

It would be a pretty sweeping statement to say "Wiley doesn't do that," because Wiley is so big. However, my parts of Wiley (though what I do is not directly related to copy editing and the like) do not do that.