Date: 23 Aug 2004 19:27:41 -0000 Message-ID: <20040823192741.28105.qmail@plover.com> To: mjd-book@plover.com Subject: "Higher Order Perl" is moving along Organization: Plover Systems If you forgot what this list is about, or you don't know why you're getting this message, please see http://perl.plover.com/book/ To unsubscribe, send a blank message to mjd-book-unsubscribe@plover.com. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Since I summarized the upcoming schedule in the last message, I thought this time I'd just go over it and supply updates. COPYEDITING * The book is currently being copyedited. We expect the copyediting to be finished by tomorrow, 16 July. * Troy will review the copy edits and then send them to me for my review on 20 July. (That will be my seventh wedding anniversary. Whee!) Since the last message, the copy editing has been completed. This means that my finished manuscript was printed out and given to the copy editor, who went over it correcting spelling and enforcing Morgan Kaufmann house rules. (For example, I am not allowed to refer to the example above. I may only refer to the preceding example. Please do not ask me what difference this makes.) She also added lots of marks to tell the compositor how things should be tagged hen the manuscript is composed. ("CH" for chapter headings, "B" for level 2 section headings, and so on.) * I answer the copyeditor's questions and un-correct anything that needs un-correcting, by 12 August. It might be a little later, since I will be at OSCON briefly during this time. I got the original manuscript with the copy editor's actual red pencil marks on it and went over all the corrections. I made a bunch of similar spelling and formatting corrections myself. I also un-corrected a lot of changes the copy editor made that were Just Plain Wrong, and a bunch that were unnecessary. The copy editor would have changed "a lot" to "many" in that last sentence. Why? I don't know. Maybe "a lot" sounds too colloquial? In that case they would have been better off hiring George Will to rewrite the whole book, because the whole book is like that. I've read a lot of terrible things people have written about copy editors (see http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000918.html for example) and I'm glad to say that my opinion of the copy editor was not as low as Geoffrey Pullum's. I think I'm also allowed to make minor insertions and deletions in this stage. My recollection is that Richard Camp, my editor's assistant, told me that it was OK to add paragraphs but not sections. That suits me fine. I moved a couple of things around, and added a sentence here and a paragraph there in about fifteen places. I corrected at least one major technical error that would have made me feel like a complete ass. During this phase, I also went over all the program callouts and gave them names that were <= 17 characters, which the designers say is all that will fit in the margins. This was incredibly tedious. I also wrote captions for all the illustrations. I shipped back the now doubly-marked manuscript on Friday, and it arrived this morning. ILLUSTRATIONS * Meanwhile, my awful ASCII-art diagrams, and some others I doodled on the back of napkins, are being redrawn by professional illustrators. I am told that these are almost done. I have seen four samples, some of which I liked and some of which I didn't. I sent back suggestions and got new versions of the samples, which were better. The poor illustrators will have to be clairvoyant to figure out how the pictures looked in my head when all they have are the awful ASCII-art diagrams. * Troy will deliver these to me around 12 August. Then I get to review them and return them around 19 August. They aren't here yet, but they should be along soon. COMPOSITION * After I return the reviewed, copy-edited manuscript, it goes to the compositor for typesetting. The compositor will apparently work from my HTML files and turn them into LaTeX. Eventually I will get possession of the LaTeX files; maybe I will make them available on my web site. (But only if I can figure out how to get LaTeX to generate something other than Computer Modern fonts. Last week Richard asked me if there was anything I wanted to specify about the interior design, and the only thing I had to say was "No Computer Modern". The little curvy foot on the capital 'R' makes me gag whenever I look at it.) Several people wrote to tell me how to do this. Thanks. * The publisher folks will decide on an internal layout and design. The compositor will make some sample pages for us all to admire. Morgan Kaufmann has generously agreed to let you folks see the sample page designs, which I love. I hope you like them as much as I do. If you've been on this list a while, you know the rules: Please do not distribute the advance freebies I send out on the mailing list, and please do not distribute the URL either. The main reason for this is because I do not want crappy, error-filled drafts circulating around making me look bad. For the sample page designs, this is EVEN MORE IMPORTANT. The sample page designs contain text from the uncorrected, unedited version of the manuscript. They are covered with black boxes and arrows pointing out what is a chapter number and what is a section heading and so on. They are not even a coherent extract of the text, because the designer took chunks out of different parts of the book that happened to have the typographic features he wanted. For instance, page 1 of the sample is a mock-up of the first page of chapter 4, but then he needed an example of a line of code that would spill into the margin, and the one he happened to find was from chapter 7. The sample design is designed to be looked at, not to be read, and anyone trying to read this sample will be very confused. If they didn't get the explanation you are getting, they would think that the book is a pile of junk. So here is the URL for the sample, and please please do not distribute it to anyone, because then it will end up on slashdot and two thousand slashdot idiots will all be saying how awful my book is and I will have to kill them all. [ Sorry, advance goodies are available only to mailing list subscribers. Send mail to mjd-book-subscribe@plover.com to subscribe. ] Continuing on: * Around 13 September, I get the complete page proofs, which are the pages laid out and composed pretty much as they will be in the final product. I go over them, check them, and return them by 1 October. I imagine the schedule for this will be a little later, since I finished revising the copy edits a few days late and since the illustrations aren't here yet. INDEXING * The freelance indexer gets the page proofs at the same time and makes an index. She also merges in the index requests I will supply. When I sent off the final manuscript for copy editing, I also sent two HTML versions that had the index stuff more explicitly marked. One version had each index item marked with an HTML comment, like this: Then it manufactures a stub function, and the other had visible annotations, like this: Then it manufactures a
stub function |