Editing Services

[Woody44]

Sorry - double post

[Woody44]

It was how we were taught in both high school and grade school. 13th edition of CMOS wasn't published until after that for me.

That's the kind of thing a simple-ish checker could fix though.

The reference to CMOS 13.37 is to the section of the CMOS, not the edition.

I'm 81 years old. I graduated from high school in 1962. The current CMOS/AP way is what I was taught in high school. It doesn't get much more archaic than that.

[seasoned_geek]

The reference to CMOS 13.37 is to the section of the CMOS, not the edition.

I'm 81 years old. I graduated from high school in 1962. The current CMOS/AP way is what I was taught in high school. It doesn't get much more archaic than that.

I went to a poor school. In 4th grade we still had "science" textbooks claiming meat naturally contained maggots. Spontaneous Generation they called it. Really tough sell to a bunch of farm kids who raised livestock.

At any rate, we were taught to always end a quote before the next paragraph.

[lgsl]

LibreOffice is a train wreck that got hit by a plane crash and is rolling downhill towards a daycare center at noon play.

I agree, their UI is awful and their MS Office compatibility mediocre.

Even on a machine with 20 physical core and 120 physical GB of RAM I could barely edit this book. For the editor who was trying to run Linux Mint in a VM on her laptop it took 45 minutes to load.

Every book in my award winning and trademarked technical book series that was written with LibreOffice can only be edited by that version on that OS. Attempt to open them with a different version of LO and you trash the file.

There is no ODT standard. Despite people pointing to something published by some organization there is no such standard. Just try to open the same ODT file with embedded images on two different (even different Linux) platforms and it will not work. The display will be trashed.

If you have afile that takes 45 minutes to load and is just text with some images, this says a lot. You probably are using the wrong tool for the job. There is a reason why word processors for writers exists. This applications, internally, split chapters into files to avoid this kind of issues and reduce the chance of file corruption.
I find surprising that someone who has an award winning book series make such a rookie mistake as treating a draft as if it was the final product and laying out the book as is being written. This is why you «trash» the file so easy and why, in part, it can take up to 45 minutes to load. While is possible to use a word processor to create layout a book, is not the right tool for the job and, in the best of cases, you will manage to get an ok/amateurish-looking result. Not to mention that the layout should come after the final draft is ready.

There is no ODT standard. Despite people pointing to something published by some organization there is no such standard. Just try to open the same ODT file with embedded images on two different (even different Linux) platforms and it will not work. The display will be trashed.

ODT is a standard. What happens is two things: LibreOffice uses by default an «extended» version of the format, meaning they turn on experimental features. This can be change. You just need to navigate their awful settings window to find it where. And the second issue I have mentioned before: you layout the boo kas you write. NEVER do that.

No, my idea is the solution. 99% of the editors on ServiceScape try to pull whatever gets uploaded into MS Word on their, often times, Apple platform, then export it with the change tracking they did. Guess what? It is trashed.

As I said twice already... Because you treat your draft as it was a final product. Even if you wrote your book directly into a professional layout program like InDesign, you would trash the book every time you edited text or manipulated an image, graphic or text box. It's an awful practice.

None of them can pull in TextMaker's default/internal format . . . or at least none I've encountered. TextMaker needs to steal a page from WordPerfect for its internal file format. Needs to allow font embedding so you get the exact same font no matter what system opened the file. I used that a lot when WordPerfect ruled the world.

Even if they could it would still happen. TextMaker's default/internal format is just MS's docx format + a few extras. You can embed fonts on TM 2024.

Chicago is the bible. If you are writing books you expect people to pay money for, you use it. This is how every reader who looks at a single page before making the buy/ignore decision of your book makes the subconscious decision. They don't even know it is Chicago, they just know your book doesn't look like the others they bought so it must be a hack. They won't actually say it, just know there is "something wrong" or "doesn't look professional."

As a graphic designer with an MBA on literature I disagree with what you just said. Your «bible», as well as the other «bible» APA, where created by academics who wanted to standardize a format for their academic papers. Nothing else. Then, if you look closely those «bibles» you realise, that, clearly, good design practices where not a factor. It amuses me how, for instance, APA claims you should use Arial for both titles and body text. Arial is a copy of Helvetica, a typeface that was created to be use in big sizes. It has readability problems when used in small sizes, but... Who cares, right? They are academics, they know best.

[lgsl]

Yes, a good editor should be able to adjust to the editorial style required by the client. In my experience, the "big three" in the United States are the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), the Associated Press (AP) style book, and the APA style book.

True. But that's not the issue here. The problem is when you treat an early draft as a final draft that you as if was ready for the printers. For instance: If you have a text-box where you can fit 500 words, then your editor add 4 more, you would have to make the text box bigger. Then this will displace everything else and «trash your file». The issue here is mostly about bad practices.

[Woody44]

None of them can pull in TextMaker's default/internal format . . . or at least none I've encountered. TextMaker needs to steal a page from WordPerfect for its internal file format. Needs to allow font embedding so you get the exact same font no matter what system opened the file. I used that a lot when WordPerfect ruled the world.

TextMaker allows embedding fonts.