Basic Book Design/Pre-Printing Checklist

Pre-Printing Checklist

• 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.