How Should I Submit Changes to Page Proofs?
In a series of posts Virtus will provide tips and advice covering many aspects of publishing. This series will be an ongoing selection of production tips, covering areas that many authors find difficult or confusing. These will be short and to the point. The best practices follow the recommendations of The Chicago Manual Style and the specific section is cited as appropriate.
Virtus Publishing Production Tip
How Should I Submit Changes to Page Proofs?
After page proofs have been created, .pdfs are sent to authors for proofreading. This always raises the question as to how to best submit any changes or corrections.
Although there are many .pdf viewer programs available, Virtus recommends Adobe Acrobat Reader, which can be downloaded for free here: Download Acrobat Reader.
Note: Be sure to uncheck “Install McAfee Security Scan Plus” so that it won’t be automatically downloaded and installed along with Reader.
Adobe Reader provides a wide variety of intuitive and user-friendly tools tool that enable you to add comments to your page proofs to indicate where changes should be made. The sample above shows text that has been highlighted. Highlighting the text opens a dialogue box where you would type in your comment.
Note that authors don’t edit the .pdfs: In this stage .pdfs are simply marked for the typesetter, who makes the actual changes in Adobe InDesign, and then creates a revised pdf.
It is always advisable to be very clear as to what should be changed and it doesn’t really matter which tool is used in Reader.
Note that if text longer than a sentence or two is being replaced, a separate Microsoft Word file should be submitted. But the page proof stage changes should be strictly limited to minor corrections that may have been missed earlier.
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