To demonstrate why we've asked you to follow these procedures, we'll give you an idea of what happens to your book during the editing and typesetting process. This is the journey an electronic manuscript makes at a typical publishing house. At some point during the review process, the acquisitions editor may indicate to the author that the publisher would prefer the manuscript be on disk if it is accepted for publication. If the manuscript already is on disk, the editor will inquire about the hardware and software used in its preparation. When the manuscript is accepted for publication, many presses send a questionnaire to the author asking for more formal information on hardware and software.
Most editors routinely request a sample disk.
If the editor is not familiar with the author's system, a sample disk will be required. Editing While the author is finishing the final revisions on the manuscript, the press uses the author's sample disk to verify that the disks will be usable by the typesetter and to determine how much work will be involved in any conversion or clean-up. In addition, the compositor or editor will clean up any problems the author may have introduced in his or her work on the files, deleting unnecessary boldface commands, lowercasing chapter titles that are typed in all capital letters, deleting any soft hyphens, making sure the author has not used the letter l when he or she was supposed to use the number 1, and so forth. How long this work takes depends entirely on how carefully the author prepared his or her disks and manuscript. The manuscript is then edited.