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Basic Book Design/Pre-Printing Checklist

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Pre-Printing Checklist

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  • 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.