Basic Book Design/Pre-Printing Checklist
Pre-Printing Checklist
edit- Search for "there are" and rewrite these sentences.
- Search for ", and". Consider breaking these sentences into two sentences.
- Search for just, very, really, and actually, and remove.
- Search for "ly-" and remove the hyphen.
- Consistently use either "for example" or "e.g."
- Consistently use either "in other words” or "i.e."
- Search periods following quotations marks.
- Search for two spaces after periods, question marks, and exclamation marks.
- No hidden index entries in the front or back matter (e.g., title page, table of contents).
- Use a grammar checker to find passive voice sentences, and rewrite in active voice.
- Check capitalization in all chapter and section titles.
- Search for repeated carriage returns, and remove.
- Replace fi and fl with ligatures (also ff, ffi and ffl if you have access to the expert set).
- M-dashes breaking at line breaks.
- Ellipses breaking at line breaks.
- Automated hyphenation on. No too-short or too-long word divisions.
- First paragraph of chapters, sections, and subsections not in-dented.
- Chapter titles in running headers correct.
- First page of chapters don't have headers, instead have drop folios (page number in footer).
- Title page, first page, etc. on recto (right-hand) pages.
- No widows.
- Number of pages fits into signatures (e.g., 224 pages).
- Graphics neither too dark not too light.
- Table of contents page numbers correct.
- Index page numbers correct.
- Crop PDF file pages to page size.
- Bar code price correct. The price is the smaller bar code to the right. Above you'll see a number. It will start with a 5, if your price is in American dollars. Ignore the first digit. The rest of the number is your price. E.g., “51995” means US$19.95.
- Canadian Price. Use the latest exchange rate to check this.