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.