Changes are made to the author s disk from the copyedited manuscript, and the typesetting is done in a desktop publishing program such as Quark. The least common typesetting method is double keyboarding. It s hugely expensive because it s labor-intensive, but it is the most reliable system by far. When a manuscript is typeset using double keyboarding, two copies are made and sent to two separate typesetters, who key in, or typeset, the corrected book from scratch. The two finished disks are compared, character by character, by a computer.
Any discrepancy is flagged, and corrected by a human looking at the copyedited manuscript.
In another method of typesetting, the book is keyboarded from the copyedited manuscript, the text is formatted by the typesetter, and the result is proofread against the copyedited manuscript. Typesetting is a complex art, and one that directly affects the readability of your book. It s not just flowing a manuscript into a template. The typesetter corrects widows and orphans, those short lines that stop the eye at the very top or the end of the page or paragraph. They look for and correct rivers, the flow of white throughout the text that you can see when you look at a page with slightly blurred eyes.