Barriers

posted by Rob on December 17, 2007 07:45 AM

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Can you imagine writing a novel if you had to do all your edits and corrections by crossing something through and writing it out again with a pen? Can you imagine (or remember) producing photo-ready artwork for illustrated books and then physically cutting and pasting with actual cuts and actual paste in order to get your book ready to print? They used to be the only ways and now that's all vanished. It must have been an awful, colossal pain and it certainly had the effect of making sure that the contents of books stayed where you put them. It took a lot of effort to propagate words and pictures. But now that layouts are done with clicks, and editing is so easy that you can think about the words not what your hands are doing, it's easy to blur the distinction between books, magazines, online articles and other people's websites. For part of every book's life, all of its words and pictures and layout are just ones-and-zeroes. In theory, they could go anywhere next. There's no such thing as book text as compared with online text. It's all electronic, at least while it's being prepared. So I was wondering if anyone out there does unusual things with their book files. Do any of you use DocBook or DITA? Do you do clever things in FrameMaker instead of InDesign/Quark? I'm sure Salt do. Does anyone else?

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Comments: 3


I use plain ol' Word. When I think I have a piece of work that I'm happy with, I print it out and edit it with pen and paper. I find most of my typos, formatting problems, and some pretty significant content problems this way. Then I integrate the edits into the piece, print out a final copy for my paper file, and save a copy to a flash drive and a copy to the hard drive.

That said, if I had to do all the initial edits with pen and paper it would drive me mad. The thing I've never been able to get my head around is typewriters. The first time I found one error that meant I'd have to retype many pages, I'd throw the damn thing out the window.


It just occurred to me that you were speaking only to publishers. Boy, do I feel like an idiot. I just saw "writing a novel" and thought "of course this is addressed to me." Sorry.


Well, the last bit is probably publishers only - I'd be surprised if you 'repurposed your content' and such - but talk of pens and crossing out is writerly to the core. And I agree with you that typewriters have had their day. I would have wanted one thirty years ago (in fact I had one around then*) but now they'd just feel like the most maddening, inflexibly picky, brain-dead word processors imaginable.

*Wow! Just how old *am* I?

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