Today, we continued on from last week’s session about interior design by taking a piece of text provided on Blackboard and eliminate the errors that had been introduced. This was harder than I first thought since, unlike copy-editing, you are looking for more than just grammatical and publisher-specific setting errors but, more specifically, making the necessary changes such as hyphen, en and em-dash misuses. These inconsistencies can be found by a programme integrated within InDesign by pressing Command F; you can look for all the hyphens that should be en-dashes, for example. However, this only finds the punctuation marks that you have been searching for, it will not distinguish what is correct and what is wrong. You have to go through all the flagged hyphens to see if that hyphen has been accurately used; if it has, move on; if it hasn’t, make the change. Although not being the most exciting part of production, this process is pivotal for a books consistency. As David Moratto explains, A professional interior book design sells your book while/and most importantly delivers what your content is all about. Whether your book is a novel or technical your interior pages have to navigate the reader effortlessly (properly), through your book pages. Without interior design, the reader will notice the quality. Quality is not just in the content but in how it is produced so it is important to meet these basic requirements. I feel like I have made decent progress doing this and feel ready to tackle the typesetting assignment at the end of the module.
Sources
Moratto,.David. http://www.davidmoratto.com/BOOK-DESIGNER/interior-book-design-samples.html [date accessed: 22 March 2016].