: How can non-designers learn to approve a print layout? I am not a designer, I am a scientist. I write papers in Word or LaTeX, the conference organisers give me a template with fonts, rules
I am not a designer, I am a scientist. I write papers in Word or LaTeX, the conference organisers give me a template with fonts, rules like "Caption for figures go below the figure, captions for tables go below the table", etc. I submit a paper in this template, which is reviewed. If it is accepted, I submit the paper (minor corrections are allowed) to the proceedings publishers as a pdf file. The submission system does some very crude automated checking (fonts embedded, page number not over limit) before accepting the file. At some point, a human looks over the file and mails me if there are any problems found. And for me, there are always problems.
I am not a tidy person. Not only don't I righten the proverbial misaligned picture, I don't even notice there's a problem with it. So I don't catch the cosmetic errors with the layout of my files. I look only for the very big things, like whether there is half a page of blank space, and whether the two columns in the ACM layout align on the last page. If there are none, I submit. And then always get requests to repair things like tables running 1 mm into the margins, or the bottom quarter of a line hidden behind a figure. This wastes quite a lot of time for both me and the publisher who waits for me.
Obviously, I need to learn how to proof-look (is there a real word for that?) my layouts better, but I don't know where to start. Is there something like a check list which can teach me what to look for? Can you point me to a good one? I guess there are thousands of things which can go wrong, but I am probably falling into the most common newbie traps, so even the simplest list of known "problem areas" will be an improvement. If there are some general guidelines on how to look, or tricks, or even an easy tool which can take my pdf and point out inconsistencies (but please no heavy-weight design package with built-in checking), I'd be happy to hear about these too.
Edit: I do compose the text with the final layout. My professor insists on this for several reasons, chiefly because there is a hard upper limit on the number of pages and we must judge the length of each chapter and sub-chapter at each revision (2-3 revisions per week) to be sure the final text will fit. Besides, I make many figures and almost all tables directly in Word. Composing the content without the final formatting would be very inefficient in this case.
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You keep asking for a checklist, so let me start one for you. I'll even make this a wiki so everyone else can pile on.
Headlines are in the correct font and
size.
Type is in the correct font and size.
No images or tables violate the margins.
No extra return between headline and
text.
No half page of blank space.
Words are not hyphenated over a page
break.
Look at the top, left, right, and
bottom margins of every image or
table which breaks the flow of text.
Is any text cut off? Is any text IN
the image or text cut off or
unreadable?
Does every image or table have a
source?
Is there a header? is it correctly
formatted?
Is there a footer? is it correctly
formatted?
Check for fraction glyphs to confirm
they are fractions and not corrupted
dingbats. (you may have to skim your
text throughout unless you made notes
where they are.)
jump in when you know the words, gang.
Based on your comment...
I don't decide the final look, the
conference organizer does. But he
doesn't get to see the paper after he
has approved the content. There is a
publisher who combines all
contributions to a book called
"proceedings" and takes care of
printing, but he is not allowed to
make any changes to the files I am
sending him, not even to remove an
empty line which got inserted after a
heading - he must tell me the line is
there and I must send the new file.
...it sounds as though there is some kind of a production process in place. I suggest you speak with the conference organizer and the publisher to see if they have editorial and production proofing guidelines to go by.
Beyond that, since you are the one who is doing the layout and proofing your own work, then the onus is on your to apply all due diligence in making sure that your layout is consistent and correct. To help you with this, I suggest you find a LaTeX-savvy page layout program that utilizes object, paragraph, and character style sheets to help you maintain a consistent look. If you can't do that, then I suggest asking the publisher who they recommend to proof your pages for you.
To answer the specific question of "How can non-designers learn to approve a print layout?", the simplest answer is practice. Get a set of editorial and design guidelines from your publisher, professor, or whomever maintains editorial control over the content, and go against that. You will never catch everything you do wrong, however so its always a good idea to get a proofreader to go over the document for you not matter how many times you do it.
Why don't you look over your last five or ten submissions, make a note of all the mistakes which someone flagged, and turn that into a checklist? If three of your last four papers had tables which leaked over the margins, you know that when you're done and you print out your proof copy, you have to take a pencil and draw a line down the right-hand margin of the text on every page and see if any tables leak over it.
It doesn't matter what a standard checklist might encompass. It matters what mistakes you might be making.
This is a difficult question. What you are asking for is a checklist which includes the set of everything. The answer is really "no" there is no checklist, and "no" fancy DTP software will not help you: DTP software is designed to be open ended and non-rigid.
That said, your ideal checklist is going to be the specific template guidelines and a list of all the things you may have had to fix in the past.
I presume that you are composing the paper at the same time as laying it out. This is most likely your problem. if you compose it as a running document with minimal or no styling, and after the content is fixed you then "assembly line it" with the styles required in multiple passes (do one thing top to bottom in each pass), you are more likely to arrive at a styled document with fewer inconsistencies.
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