Thanks, AM.

I’ve played around with it a little bit. I should be getting the job next week. And yes, I will have to import the file and I will definitely be checking out the stories first to page it, and then when saving, check in the links (or whatever it’s called).

It looks like once I get first pass pages done, I will be returning the ID file to them (as well as an exported InCopy file). And they will supposedly do 2nd pass corrections and stuff. Of course, they may send it back to us to repage, so their incopy file will be sent to me at that time again.

This whole thing is going to be a nightmare, I think. Some of their editors don’t work at the publisher’s place of business and may work at home. And the publishers are in NYC, and I’m in Syracuse. So keeping the linked stories on one server is pretty much impossible.

This is something new they are doing, and I have no idea where they got the idea from. I guess I understand how they want to do things electronically instead of writing down their corrections on the actual page proofs, but I think it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

For example, let’s say they take my exported first pass InCopy file. They do their corrections and send it back to me. I then update my ID file so I can repage–but I have no idea what changes were made. ID won’t highlight any changes they made, so for all I know they could have made a correction on page two, which caused a bad line break. Or inserted a paragraph somewhere which caused reflow, and I will have to go through the entire document to see where it was inserted. Or deleted. Or they type in new ellipses (three dots). In the first pass they will have thin-spaces between the periods, but if they type it in InCopy, it won’t be. Same thing with italic versus character styles.

I and the proof room will basically have to check each and every page 2nd pass. If we had hard-copy to see the corrections it wouldn’t be an issue. But there will be no hard copy.

Can you imagine the nightmare I and the company I work for will be facing?

I shudder thinking about it.

But the publisher is going through some company who streamlines things and they must think it’s the way to go. I hate companies like that–they don’t use common sense.

Reminds me of a company years ago who advised us that we should page jobs in Word Perfect because that was the way of the future…

Thanks for your reply, Mike. I also don’t understand why they want these things. And you’re right–it would be a total nightmare and would cause a lot of extra time to turn off the keep options. I’m hoping we can just uncheck those things when the book is all done and they go to archive it. But sometimes they start the eBooks in the early stages.

Thanks for that grep-based script for the cap problem. I will play with it. Hopefully I can find something more user friendly as a lot of folks in the shop aren’t GREP-knowledgeable.

I appreciate your explanation of everything, and I will share with my bosses.

Thanks again