Date: 3 Nov 2004 20:15:18 -0000 Message-ID: <20041103201518.25228.qmail@plover.com> To: mjd-book@plover.com (Higher Order Perl announcement list) Subject: "Higher Order Perl" proofreading almost done Organization: Plover Systems From: Mark Jason Dominus 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------- When I last wrote, I had just finished correcting the copy-editor's corrections of the manuscript, and I had sent it back to the publisher for the typesetting and composition. I said: I'll try to send another message at the end of the proofreading phase, or maybe when I get the illustrations. And here we are at the end of the proofreading phase, It's a month later than scheduled, but for once it was not my fault. I started receiving the page proofs a few weeks ago. Page proofs are what comes from the compositor showing the very final form that the book will take, with all the text and displays and illustrations properly formatted and typeset. Modulo errors, it looks exactly the way the book will when it is printed. There were lots of errors. All the single-quoted strings in chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9 have been carefully set with balanced quotation marks instead of with apostrophes at each end. Apparently the person who typeset the first five chapters knows more about computer books than the person who typeset the last four chapters. Oh, well. There was also a big screwup in the illustrations for chapter 4 that was entirely my fault. I left out one of the illustrations, so all the others got bumped up one slot, and none of them were in the right places. Speaking of which, I learned something interesting about typesetting that I should have known. I have always cursed at LaTeX because it wants to put the illustrations at the top or the bottom of a page instead of adjacent to the place where the illustration is referenced. Now I have discovered that LaTeX is only enforcing a standard typesetting convention. I complained to the production manager about the placement of the illustrations and he told me it was always done that way. So in order to dispute him, I picked a couple of books off my desk to serve as counterexamples, and what do you know? He was right. My book's production manager is an expert on matters of typesetting and book design; who would have guessed? (But I still suspect that this is a stylistic holdover from the days of metal type, when there was perhaps some physical constraint that made it difficult or impossible to compose the pages with the illustrations in the middle of the pages, and that the constraint is long gone and the style persists through pure inertia. Someday I hope to write a book about such things, which I call "horseheads"; I have been collecting examples for years now.) I believe this was the last major job I had to do before the book could be printed. Meanwhile, the proofreader is also correcting the page proofs. My corrections and the proofreader's will be merged into the master proofs. I hope that I get another pass at the proofs, preferably in electronic form this time, because I don't trust the compositors to get the apostrophes right. But everything else I have to do is minor. The proofs include the illustrations, so the illustrations had to be finished before the proofs. In the last message I said: 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. The illustrators must have been clairvoyant, because I'm really happy with the way they came out. I have placed a couple of samples at: [ Sorry, advance goodies are available only to mailing list subscribers. Send mail to mjd-book-subscribe@plover.com to subscribe. ] These are jpegs I made by turning the original PDFs into bitmaps, so they will contain artifacts and font ookiness that were not in the originals. In the message before last, I said: 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. And in the last message I commented that: 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. In fact, I got the page proofs closer to 13 October than to 13 September, and my deadline for returning them was 5 November, not 1 October. Accordingly, the publication date for the book has slipped again, this time to 10 December. Darn! If you would like to pre-order the book, it is now available from all reputable on-line booksellers. If you would like to give me an additional kickback, you can order from Barnes and Noble via this URL: http://perl.plover.com/hop/ORDER.html Two other exciting things have happened since the last message. One is that I got to see the mockups of the book's cover. I chose one of these designs and made some suggestions about it, and MK is now working on the final version. The other is that my editor wrote up the copy that goes on the back cover. I was thinking about sending out the back-cover copy, but then I thought that that would just inspire people to send me a lot of suggestions and complaints about it, and since it is too late to do anything about that it would just depress me. So you will have to wait. I may send out a picture of the cover if I get a finished one in time. I expect to send another message around the time that the book goes to press. Thanks again to all of you for your interest and patience.