Character counts, word counts, signatures, and spine sizes.

[alg]

Today at the dentist, I had a different dentist who was hideous to me, and I went back to the office in tears. Luckily, I work with people like pnh and tnh and claireeddy, and they took excellent care of my emotional and physical state.

I have a long list of things to do, but first I am going to give you some information.


How to do a Castoff -- A step-by-step guide to getting an accurate character count -- and how to estimate how long your manuscript will be as a bound book!



I hope you guys will now relax a little bit about how to do a character count, and also how the length of print books get figured out. No more sitting up nights, rocking back and forth, muttering to yourself and biting your nails because you can't remember how many pages are in a signature or what front matter is! Anna to the rescue!

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

I once converted endnotes in Word to footnotes in WordPerfect (including the automagic codes to make the footnotes refer back to other footnotes/pages by number). Which was hideous.

And then the author *kept sending me line edits every single day*, which needed to be hand-entered *by me*, because otherwise I'd have to run the conversion all over again!

(This was for a law review article.)

Sorry, bad flashback there. In short: authors getting the footnote/endnote thing wrong: very bad for so many reasons.

[kchew.livejournal.com]

Oh God. All you had to say was Word to Wordperfect and I started to hyperventilate. A few years ago, I had a copyeditor do an onscreen edit in Word (normally we did copyedits on paper, but we had six weeks cut from our production schedule, and so on, editorial and production heroics ensue). I then sent the file to the author, who swore he had Word and could work on the files, but said that he liked Wordperfect better. He then decided on his own that he didn't want to use Word, because he hardly ever did, converted everything to Wordperfect, did his changes, and sent it back.

All the changes...his, the coypeditor's...were in green. And permanent. I couldn't tell what he'd done, and what the copyeditor had done, or go back and undo anything to figure it out. And...to make a long story short, I had to do a very long, onscreen comparison of files and make everything work by hand, so we could keep the production schedule.

And yes, he was the sort of person who was sending me line changes every single day too, and darned snarky about it because in the middle of this he went on vacation where he could not be reached by phone, fax, or email without prior arrangement. He is on my Black List Forever.

Word/Wordperfect conversions...shudder. Shudder, shudder. Bad flashback empathy.

[kate_nepveu]

Oh, gawd, no, I was wrong, it was WordPerfect to *Word*. Wow, I'd blocked out more than I'd thought of that episode.

Going to WordPerfect at least gives you "reveal codes" so you can see what kind of weird formatting has been imported. Going to Word . . . *shudders*