Three things every editor should know about digital publishing

A while ago I gave this talk at the Cape Town Professional Editors Group. Here are my speaking notes.

Today, every passage you edit will sooner or later be read on screen. This digital world desperately needs our craft and high standards, but what does that mean for our daily work? In this talk I’ll pick out three big, important issues, and talk about some of the tools we’re using to tackle them. The first is text-only editing. That is, the end of word processing as we know it. The second is real-time, collaborative editing. And third, automagical pagination: how do we edit when there’s no such thing as ‘page two’?

So what does this digitisation thing really mean for editors? I think, basically, it means you’re editing text that will be read on a screen. Importantly, you’re editing text that will be read on a screen and on paper.

Now if you’re going to edit for the screen, the single most important thing is to actually read on a screen yourself. If you aren’t reading on screen, you simply cannot edit for the screen. Just like you can’t fix a car if you’ve never ridden in one.

That said, we are all busy people and there is an infinite amount to learn about computers: the rate at which the technium evolves far outstrips the rate that we can understand it. Even the greatest minds in computing readily admit that the Internet is now bigger and more complex than any one person understands.

So the trick is to not try too hard to learn it. Rather, just start using web- and screen-oriented tools and the learning will come when you need it. No one went to a whole seminar on how to use email before they sent an email.

In the next thirty minutes or so I’ll pick out three big, important developments and talk about some of the tools we’re using to tackle them. This is basically show and tell.

The first is text-only editing. That is, the end of word processing as we know it.

The second is real-time, collaborative editing.

And third, I’ll talk a little about automagical pagination: how do we edit when there’s no such thing as ‘page two’?

Text-only editing

First, what is text-only editing? Text-only editing is editing in plain-text files. When you do this, you’ll probably be using a particular writing structure called Markdown. For instance, let’s use Stackedit to write plain-text markdown. Type on the left, and on the right Stackedit turns our plain text into formatted HTML.

On the left, I type plain text in a markdown structure. On the right, formatted HTML.

On the left, I type plain text in a markdown structure. On the right, formatted HTML.

What we’re seeing here is the separation of content (which is structured text and image-references only) from formatting and design.

What are the big advantages of text-only editing?

  1. Smaller, faster files.
  2. Computers need perfect consistency (the digital age is a wonderful place for obsessive copy editors). Here the tools force our hand, and we learn to be less sloppy.
  3. Text-only means fewer copy-paste messes (when you copy paste into a new document and the fonts go all weird), because I’m getting only and exactly what I’m seeing. Plain text. We do have learn some new tricks like unicode glyphs (there is no ‘Insert symbol’ font or formatting gimmicks, like superscripting an o for a degrees symbol). This is actually a good thing, even if it seems like more work at first while we learn its tricks.
  4. Less file corruption, because there is simply less going on – less code to go wrong.
  5. Better version control, especially if you learn to use a tool like Git.

Collaborative editing

Collaborative editing has literally changed the way I write, edit and deliver documents.

What is collaborative editing? In short, me and someone else editing the same online document at the same time. The biggest tool for this is Google Docs.

What are the major pros of collaborative editing?

  1. It lets others watch while you work. And you can watch while others work. Publishing is weird because it’s always been a team sport played by lonely freelancers from their own home offices. Collaborative editing instantly makes the team aspect real and useful.
  2. You can use commenting for feedback and discussion. Track changes just isn’t the same as actual live annotation. No more emailing documents with increasing repetitions of the word ‘final’ in the file name. (Also, see Hypothesis.)
  3. Instant delivery of work and real-time review. As soon as you’re ready for your client to check something, share the doc and the ball’s in their court. So much editing is problem solving, and collaborative editing means the publisher-editor-designer are basically always in the room together at the same time.

I cannot believe that Google Docs has been around for years and people are still editing in MS Word. I promise, promise, promise you want to move all your writing and editing into Google Docs. (You could also use something similarly cloud-based with live collaborative editing but, for better or for worse, most people are familiar with Google and already have Google accounts).

Automagical pagination

Lastly, what is automagical pagination? Well, on screen, our software and screen size are going to decide how much text is on the ‘page’, the visible area in front of us. On screens we might refer to this as the ‘viewport’. If you’ve used Kindle, iBooks, or Google Play Books you probably know what this looks like.

There are a few key issues that arise when text flows into a viewport. And very importantly, when you’re editing the same text for both that viewport and also print output.

  1. Hyphenation and non-breaking spaces. Of course you never want to put a hard hyphen into a line because that line will be made and remade in countless different lengths in its life, and you don’t want your hyphens turning up in the middle of a line. You also don’t want the space in a number like 100 000 breaking over a line, so you need to learn how to insert a non-breaking space. And there are several other glyphs that have similar complications, like ellipses and en dashes.
  2. Cross-references. That is, referring to other places in the document. On screen, you can’t say ‘see page twenty’, because ‘page twenty’ is completely different on my computer and on my phone. You can’t say ‘Click here to go to the figure’, because in print there is nothing to click. And you can’t say, ‘in the figure below’, because on screen the figure might shift position. Common solutions are to introduce numbering systems for sections and figures, or to completely rephrase cross references. (Some smart digital-first workflows let you insert a variable that becomes a page reference in print, and is a hyperlink on screen.)
  3. Elements that appear on screen but not in print. For instance, let’s say you want to include a YouTube clip in an ebook, but you can’t have the clip in the print version. In some systems, it is possible to mark certain elements to appear in one version but be completely hidden in another.
  4. Minimalist courage. For maximum compatibility with unknown reading systems, you have to use fewer, more carefully-chosen features. You can’t have ten different variations on headings or boxes. Pick very few features, and treat them consistently with the same styling rules. Make no single-instance exceptions (e.g. never say “I’ll make this one heading smaller because otherwise it’ll look funny here.”)
  5. Strict content hierarchies. You have to place every feature of the book in a hierarchy, as if your whole book was a tree of trunk, branches and leaves. Computers need hierarchy.

There is lots more we could go into here but there isn’t enough time and we’d bore half the room. And as I suggested at the start, it doesn’t matter how much you try to stuff in your head now, when the only way to make it useful and make it stick is to deal with issues as they come up in your work.

I hope that you have some concrete questions, though, so we can spend some time dealing with those real issues that you’ve already come up against.