Hey Andy–I’m glad you didn’t take offense at what I said. I was worried about that because sometimes it’s difficult to determine how something was meant to be said and interpreted. I saw you replied but at first I could not find it as you didn’t “reply” to me but just posted.
Anyway–you are pretty safe just centering like you were doing. And if it looks off visually, you can always just measure to the ascenders on one side, and the descenders on the other.
I used to be a perfectionist years ago, but it’s not worth it now. I remember the days when our proof reader would say to move this 1/4 point this way, or 1/10th of a point that way. The anal stuff. But that was back in the days when typesetters could afford to do those kind of tweaks. We had two or three weeks to get a job out and the publishers were willing to pay.
Nowadays you get in a 1,200 page manuscript and they want first pages in two days. And they only want to pay rock-bottom prices.
And on top of that–you can make that space space perfect, but when it goes to the printer–it can still turn out like crap. Pick up any book nowadays and measure the head margin or the gutters/margins. It’s all over the place. The head margin might measure 1/2 inch (3 picas) on one page, but 2p8 on another. It depends upon how crooked they cut the stuff.
My personal advice (and maybe I’m jaded after 25+ years in the business) is: Do not bang your head against the wall. Put out a quality job, but don’t lose sleep over it, nor try to be superman.
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