Thirty-Two Pages?! I Guess There's No Such Thing As A Petty Detail.

[dr_pretentious]

It was an odd moment in the history of technology, the year I learned to type. My high school still conducted its typing instruction in a room full of actual typewriters, while at home I practiced typing on a then-cutting-edge Apple IIe.

Both my typing teacher and my typing instruction video game--the one in which I blew away invading aliens with the speed of my return to the home row--insisted that the end of every sentence was to be followed by two taps of the space key. Apparently that's an antiquated non-rule rule now, one that actively annoys people in production departments at publishing houses. Who knew?

So tonight, pining for the Big Book, I did a search-and-replace to bring that manuscript up to current typographical standards. (I'd love to dive back into the Beltresin novels, but I have other promises to keep first, so no mucking about in the story for me.) In a matter of seconds, it was 32 pages shorter. It's still too long, of course, but the page count at the bottom of the screen is no longer quite so mortifying.

Microsoft Word informs me that there are slightly more than 16,000 sentences in the Big Book. On no particular basis, I would have guessed there would be more. One eliminated keystroke, times 16,000...if I'd tried to cut that many pages of actual storytelling, it would have taken a week's work at my current pace--a week, assuming seven consecutive days of getting out of the house to write, which doesn't generally happen here in Parentworld. I suppose it would be possible to Just Cut Stuff faster than that, but I'd rather cut thoughtfully than fast.

Thirty-two pages. I think that really is the last of the low-hanging fruit.

Comments

[amheriksha.livejournal.com]

I hate that the rule changed for how many spaces come after a sentence ends. Apparently drove the newspaper buddies nuts every time I wrote an article. I'm STILL having trouble unlearning it.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

A double-space after a full-stop is a bad thing?? Good grief.

[sligoe.livejournal.com]

I still put double spaces after a period---one space looks too crowded!

I do it too

[tracyandrook.livejournal.com]

It shows our age, to have learned on Selectrics.

Re: I do it too

[onyxtwilight.livejournal.com]

Yup. My 8th grade typing class was manual typewriters, we didn't even have electric ones yet. I poked a hunting knife a little bit into my palm while sharpening it that year, and had to sit out of typing for two weeks because it temporarily weakened the ring and little fingers of my left hand, to the point where I couldn't press the A and S keys hard enough to make the typebars strike the paper. :-)

[onyxtwilight.livejournal.com]

The double space is still okay in an actual typewriter-produced document, but who does THAT anymore? And it often still looks better in word processed documents, depending on your font. Times New Roman in Microsoft Word looks too crowded with just one space, as Sharon points out.

Anything actually published, however, is being properly typeset in professional layout software, and double spaces in that playing field create weird little runnels of white space running through the text, dragging your eye hither and yon. Layout typography's main purpose is to create a smooth, even "color" to the paragraphs on the page, so that your eye flows easily from one line to the next without distractions. (That's why you'll never see ALL CAPS in book text, or you shouldn't -- small caps are used instead, except for short acronyms, so it looks emphasized when you actually get to it, but it doesn't grab your attention before you get to that bit of text. No bolds used in books either, for the same reason; italics provides emphasis without being glaring.)

But I wonder why they were that upset by it? Removing them is an easy search-and-replace, and it's the first thing I do after importing new text. Then I do more global replacements, turning -- into proper em dashes and so forth. Not even REMOTELY the most irritating thing that has to be done when importing text, although in a large document it can take a few minutes to process. But it's an easy fix, and it comes with the territory.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Nobody's been upset by it, but I'd seen the issue mentioned in enough places, I decided to make the ms less annoying. The Big Book has enough strikes against it just on the basis of length, it can't afford to have any other problems, large or small.

Thank you for the long explanation. There are things I used to half-know about typesetting from my mom's days as a medical editor, but she got into that field in the waning days of the linotype machine and was the first kid on her block to learn desktop publishing on the first programs that came out. I can never be sure which of the things I sort of remember would still be relevant.

[onyxtwilight.livejournal.com]

Well, and hey, it cut 32 pages at the click of a mouse without sacrificing a single word. Can't say THAT very often. :-)

Cathy and I do the same,

[amushink.livejournal.com]

Two spaces after a full stop. It is completely ingrained in my fast touch-typing fingertips. The new AOL is most annoying, as it puts a question mark (invisible to me) every time I type the two spaces. So all my e-mails to the receiver look like this.?

Re: Cathy and I do the same,

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

That happens to me, too, and it drives me batty. The chapbook of Persephone sonnets was typeset for print with two spaces after every full stop, and when the editor put it online, it didn't occur to him to change it. Not all browsers show the question marks--his didn't, but mine did, so it wasn't until months after the chapbook went up that we knew there was a problem. All better now, but very embarrassing at the time.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Michael had to do the same thing to my book.

[violet-moon25.livejournal.com]

I haven't even tried to unlearn that habit. But I am also in the learned-keyboarding-20-years-ago-on-an-electric-typewriter generation. The electric typewriters were okay but the fact that it brought down my GPA annoyed me.