I’m very pleased to say that issue 3 of The Developer is now available. I’ve been sub-editing this ‘uncommonly beautiful, 200-page biannual magazine’ for two years now, but this was the first issue to be edited in lockdown conditions.
As usual, it was an intensive three weeks of daily editing for both the magazine and its website, but all conducted remotely. We liaised through daily Zoom meetings and Slack was our go-to for communication, all of which worked smoothly.
However, I’d recommend avoiding using the desktop Mac client for SharePoint if you’re going to use it for synchronising InDesign files between computers. Unlike Dropbox, for example, the time between a new version of a file being saved, the client noticing it and uploading it to SharePoint, and then all the other clients noticing the change and downloading can range from instantaneous to a few hours and even not at all, resulting in all manner of versioning issues.
One of my gifts/curses is that I often spot typos and mistakes that most people would miss, even if the problem is there for only a few seconds. For example, I recently spotted a glaring error in an ad for Huawei on a digital bus stop advert.
No, not it’s. Its.
It was only up for a few seconds before being replaced by another ad, but nevertheless, my proofreading klaxon went off the second I saw “it’s” (contraction of “it is”) being used in the first line of the quote instead of the possessive “its”.
Naturally, of course, I wanted to know whom to blame. Was it T3 or the copywriters at Huawei’s agency. Now, it may be some eagle-eyed T3 sub spotted the problem in the ad, or someone pointed it out to the magazine and they went back to change the original copy. But I like to think they wouldn’t have let something so basic through in the first place.
At the very least, that’s not how the review reads now:
Its not it’s
So, let’s assume it’s Huawei’s agency. Is this a reflection of the reduced emphasis on subbing with digital copy (although my online subbing services are available…), with digital ads somehow being processed differently to print ads? Maybe, but to be honest, I’ve now seen enough print ads with glaring typos to know that print isn’t immune to the issue.
However, this is the first time I’ve seen a B2C high street ad with such a problem, particularly in the focus copy. I hope it’s not a sign of the shape of things to come.
Matteo Sedazzari ‘s Tales of Aggro is a right rollocking read – a series of short stories for which I did the proofreading last year and Irvine Welsh himself has recommended:
‘A real slice of life told in the vernacular of the streets’ – Irvine Welsh
Meet Oscar De Paul, Eddie the Casual, Dino, Quicksilver, Jamie Joe and Honest Ron, collectively known around the streets of West London as The Magnificent Six. This gang of working-class lovable rogues have claimed Shepherds Bush and White City as their playground and are not going to let anyone spoil the fun. Fashion conscious, music obsessed and shooting from the lip, these lads are legends in their minds and eager to stamp their identities on the often-indifferent streets.
Meet Rockin’ Wilf, uncle to Eddie, Teddy Boy, natural born thief and victim of 1970’s police corruption. Meet Stephanie, a wannabe pop star who is determined to knock spots off the Spice Girls, with her girl group.
Above all though, meet West London and hear the stories of ordinary people getting up to extraordinary adventures.
It’s all about a group of kids growing up in West London in the 70s and 80s, but continues through to the present day. The ‘aggro’ itself isn’t always want you think it is and the ending’s actually quite touching. Give Tales of Aggro a try!
Tales of Aggro: behind the scenes
From a personal perspective, it was a nice job to do and a change of pace – plus, being a SE London boy of the 80s, it was fun to read what the West Londoners were up to at the time, particularly around the Beeb! It’s also not often that I have to create a style guide from scratch, rather than inheriting one, so it meant I could get my Oxford Style Guide out again.
Over our Christmas holidays, we went to the very lovely Durham and the even lovelier Durham Cathedral. One of the surprising highlights of the cathedral, as well as the grave of the Venerable Bede himself, is the miniature version of the cathedral made from Lego that you can find in the gift shop at the back.
Unfortunately, there was something about the model’s explanatory text that caught my eye:
It’s that dangling “St” on the second line. Grrr.
Now, I don’t know if this was laid out in InDesign, but the scent of the Adobe Paragraph Composer does seem to linger over it. Now, one of my bugbears with that program is that it doesn’t have great ‘keep with’ controls. Yes, you can at least keep lines together and avoid widows and orphans, but you’d think Adobe’s expertise with type would mean it could offer more than Microsoft does with Word – look how many different kinds of white space there are in InDesign, for example:
InDesign’s “Insert White Space” function offers 12 different kinds of space
I do love both “Balanced Ragged Lines” and the Adobe Paragraph Composer, although given the effect soft returns has on them, I usually use “No Break” to avoid confusing them. “No Break” also avoids the similar problems caused by copying and pasting non-breaking spaces into pull quotes, headlines and other differently formatted text, within both InDesign and content management systems. Use “No Break” and when you “Paste Without Formatting”, the “No Break” is removed, and the text can wrap as appropriate for the new measure; use a non-breaking space or a soft return and nine times out of ten, you’ll then have to remove it manually in the destination.
InDesign’s useful ‘No Break’ function is only available through the Character palette, so I add a keyboard shortcut for it to make it easier to access
Avoiding runts
But these functions don’t prevent short words such as “St” and “I” from hanging at the end of lines or paragraphs from having “runts”. The latter can be fixed using GREP functions in stylesheets but that’s not exactly a simple fix nor one that the average freelance is empowered to use.
So it would be great if Adobe paid a little more attention to the “meat and two veg” aspects of text in InDesign, rather than just the flashier aspects of design-intensive text in short publications, brochures and adverts. It would save subs a huge amount of time if there were a simple way to automatically avoid that kind of unsightly text-handling, such as including it in Paragraph Composer by default or making it an option in paragraph formatting.
Until then, I’ll just have to keep an eye out for hanging text and runts, and keep “No Break” to hand.
