mikeneko - thumb twiddling

I seem to have "heatie" and "coolie"(?) stuck on the brain now. At odd moments, I've been looking at food items and thinking, "Is this heatie?" Certain People are warping my thoughts.

I'd gotten a call today from the woman at that one place, who wanted me to go over their monograph again.

The most time-consuming part of that one, as usual, had been converting the alphabetized citation and reference style over to (pseudo) AMA, which uses sequential numbering a la Vancouver. I always use a split screen in Word for this; I really don't how other people do it -- I'll lay odds there's probably a better, faster way, and I just haven't thought of it or don't have the macro muscle-power to work it out. I also have to keep stopping to run rapid searches to ensure that there aren't any repeats, and hopping over to PubMed to fill in the missing parts of the entries. For that particular one, I also spent quality time on Google digging up copies of the packaging inserts for a long list of drugs so that I could copy the publication information out of them, which took hours.

The other thing I do is use change tracking on the citation replacements in text in case I make some mistakes so that I can quickly backtrack and redo them. Then, once I'm done with the list, I'll toggle tracking off, accept all of the changes, and use the sort option to automatically reorganize the list. Then I go through and cut/paste the misordered items; you have to do this as reference lists use 1, 2, 3, not 001, 002, 003, so these items wind up in the wrong order. Umpteen versions later, the programmers of Word still haven't figured out that a normal user wants 2 to follow 1, not 19.

I decided to put their citation numbers in brackets following hard on the punctuation. They're actually going to be using superscript for the citations in the final publication; the brackets can be easily searched on and/or stripped and the font changed, but in the meantime these make working with the citations (style, reorganization, and so on) before publication much, much easier for everyone. Since I'm the one setting up the style here, I'm also not spacing after commas for citation strings; I've seen a few unfortunate examples of a line of superscript citation numbers being wrapped over an end-of-line break; a proofreader would spot and mark that sort of thing right off, but a lot of places aren't using proofreaders anymore. (Argh, argh.) Doing away with the space forces the software to treat a citation string as single number that can't be broken.

I keep the tracking toggled off to do file cleanup like tabbing, line spacing, replacing double spaces with singles, that sort of thing. No one wants to see that junk later. I also clean out section marks and page breaks, and copy tables and figures over into a separate file. In the past couple of years, I've started using the highlight feature in Word to call out the first cites for tables and figures. Before, I'd been using a code to do this, but my current thinking is that it's easier on people, visually, to do it with highlighting if they're not going to be using typesetting codes anyway, so that's my rationale for it (flimsy maybe, but hey). I've also been putting the queries directly into the text in curly brace sets that can be searched (as these aren't going to be used anywhere else in the document), and highlighting them as well in a different color. This is a great deal like what I used to do back in the early 1990s with MS-DOS Word, before the publishers started demanding footnotes and comments and other complicated, stupid Word tricks. It's a great relief to me that in-house editors are finally starting to get over their infatuation with Word bells and whistles and are going back to simpler procedures that aren't necessarily software specific.

And then . . . for everyone else's work, you'd always select all text and run the field-code flattening combination (just in case), then use the handy-dandy EE Grapevine macro to flatten out the Word numbering and bulleting styles. Failing the macro, you could copy/paste the list into a text editor like Textpad to get the same result, which is what I used to do until everyone began passing around copies of that charming, blessed macro. Then the standard replacements for style -- which no one's that interested in seeing either, so no tracking. When that's all done, tracking can go back on again, if needed.

Occasionally you'll hit a Word file that's so messed up that there's no way to work with it. In these cases, you just copy the entire thing except for the last paragraph mark and paste it into a new document. (This means that View Hidden is on; but then, it's always going to be on anyway. Otherwise, you can't work with the oddities that need to be fixed.) If that doesn't work, you can paste the text into a text editor then back into a new Word document, but you'll lose your italic and bold, so this is only a resort for the true hard cases. I've found that "true hard cases" may comprise bad WordPerfect conversions and documents that were created with East Asian versions of Word.

In other words, about 90% of file cleanup for the compositor involves producing a basic text/rtf file, eliminating all that Word-generated crap that writers insist on larding onto their files. Life would be much more pleasant for everyone if writers would stop trying to treat Word as though it's some sort of typesetting program. It's not. Really, really not. Writers who fuss over a document's appearance are nothing but a pain in the ass -- what matters is the content. Frilly formatting doesn't compensate for lack of writing skillz.

Using change tracking is an issue in itself. If you work with the view toggled on, you can arrive at a neat, (semi)readable file. If the tracked version isn't readable, there's very little point to using tracking. But you also can introduce some truly bone-headed errors that won't be obvious at first glance because all that stuff is cluttering the screen. If you work with the view off, you've got a better shot at attaining something that's reasonably error free the first time through, but you won't be able to see that tracked version underneath and thus won't know how readable it's turning out. So you wind up going over the file twice, once with tracking view on, once with tracking view off. Tracking also makes the file size two to three (or more) times larger. Add in the aforementioned highlighting, and the bytes really balloon.

The style thing depends entirely on who you're working for at the moment. With this place, they don't really have any preferences, so they win mine by default. Mine have been built up over umpteen years of working on this stuff, and I expect everyone else is the same way. You could probably identify random documents that were edited by me merely by drawing up style sheets from them, as these sheets would wind up looking nearly identical. Oh, for instance, I don't find en dashes for ranges to be visually appealing, so I'll always opt for 7% to 10% rather than 7-10%. I also buy into the reasoning for setting statistical probability with a capital italic P with no zero before the decimal; so, unless someone requests a different format, that's what I'll give them. I also think employing random spacing and font changes in reference lists items is a pain in the ass, so I never use them when left to my own devices.

To some extent, a lot of my preferences equal "less confusion for me" because they're part of the style for a journal I work on regularly. Others are leftovers from the style of a book company that I worked with for many years -- I may not work for them anymore, but their likes and dislikes were burned into my braincells. But this line of work is all about adapting on the fly. I've noticed that a lot of places in recent years are using hyphens instead of en dashes for number ranges, which I suppose is easier when porting the files to different softwares; so this I often do now, even though it still leaves a mental itch of discontent. I was even willing to hyphenate the -ly compounds for that one journal, even though their quirk contradicts every major style on the planet. (Nails on chalkboard time.) I had to do some serious head-clouting to get that comma before "too" fixed into my brain for Oxford, so it also tends to show up in everything I work on now.

But I'm not willing to ignore blatant grammar mistakes and spelling errors, which is how I ran afoul of Asshole Editor at that one publisher. I mean, could we please acknowledge that there might be a valid difference between hiring me and the "I got strait A's in English!" person to work on a manuscript?
Not Editor: Oh noes! This word is misspelled! That cannot be!
Freelance Editor: Misspelling is fine, but it must be consistent throughout.
I guess that would be the primary difference.

Terrible things like free-association-from-hell happen when I'm at a loose end. The files were late getting here again. Siiiiigh.

But, anyway, that particular monograph was a fast, easy read, and I didn't make any queries at all aside from the one about the extra reference entry. So when she asked me whether I'd like to do another editing pass now that the peer review has been done, I didn't have any problem with that. Apparently a few of those 20-odd tables have been dropped, so the references will require some renumbering, but I'd already done the lion's share of that the last time, so it shouldn't be a major problem (famous last words). All of which brought us to the Big Question.
She: So if I send this on Thursday night, when do you think you could have it back?
Me: By Thursday night, d'you mean, like, night? Or afternoon?
She: Around 5:00?
Me: Oh, okay. Then Friday.
She: . . . .
Me: What?
She: You could have it back on Friday?
Me: Sure.
She: Are you serious?
Me: Um, yes? I usually do work at night.
She: Oh. Well, that's, that's great.

I wonder sometimes what people are expecting, speedwise, when they go all speechless like that. It's not the first time it's happened. I mean, when I don't know exactly what I'm getting, I'll generally pad out my deadline requests with a few extra days in case the Terrible and Unexpected pops up, but generally I don't need the extra time.

The Terrible and Unexpected does seem to be popping up more often lately. People will say, "The file is only thirty pages." Somehow they seem to have progressed to this advanced point in their careers unaware that a standard manuscript page does not consist of single-spaced, 10-point type with no margins. They also seem to be blithely ignorant that all those extras like tables need to be edited, too. And they believe, apparently, that you can rework references lists with several hundred items on them with a wave of a wand. But then, it's not like you expect honesty from in-house editors. You maintain your childish belief that it exists in the world (like Santa!), but you never expect it.

Also, "We'll send the files tomorrow." Tomorrow has an open-ended interpretation lately, that could mean anything from "in two weeks" to "never." Hmm.

Anyway, yesterday's editor said, "One reviewer hasn't turned in her comments yet. If she doesn't get them in by Thursday, we'll go to press without her. All the major board members have already cleared this. If she wanted any input, she should have turned hers in on time." I'm dazzled by her sparkly show of editorial power!

*twiddling thumbs*

Tags: workish