Fonts are another issue that fall out of the assumption that all authors will type their book manuscripts on typewriters. Or more specifically, font style is the focus of today’s post.
Typewriters, typically, have or had only one font. It looked a whole lot like fixed pitch Courier, which was in fact designed to resemble it. And because the keys were right in the machine, there wasn’t any variability – the typewriter created plain text (which is sometimes called Roman text by typesetters). The typewriter didn’t make bold or italics. It could underline, though, if you backspaced and used the underline key to underline individual words. For those of you too young to remember, the underline was essentially a low line of hyphens, each strike of the key making a bar the width of one character.
In proper typewriter format, one did not underline spaces. In proper typesetting format, you could set either word underline or an underline that ran under the spaces, too, depending on the designer’s choice.
Now, underlined text is not that common in works of fiction, so the publishing industry came up with a standard for communication. Italics, in contrast, are very popular type in fiction, but authors had no way to create italic text on typewriters. So, it was agreed that authors would underline all text that should be set in italics, and the typesetters became accustomed to setting all underlined text as italics. This was in the days when the entire book manuscript would have to be retyped by the typesetter, so adding a command for italics before a word was no big deal. And it is a practice that has its legacy even deeper in the past, when type was set in metal – one of the composer’s marks indicating that a block of text should be changed to italics was to underline it.
Then came word processors and home computers, and suddenly authors DID have the ability to include italics right in their book manuscript. Whoa! This was a point of contention for a long time – should the author underline the text to be set in italics, or should the author in fact set the text that should be in italics in italics in the first place? Whose job was it to set the italics? It was certainly the author’s job to decide, and the most effective communication was to simply do it. OTOH, a single word in italics in Courier could be overlooked as italics, especially as someone had to retype the manuscript and everyone would be looking at the hard copy. So, there was much argument in writerly circles about standards and protocol.
I always just set what I wanted to print in italics in italics, right in the ms. Usually, the copy editor underlined these words in the hard copy of the ms, indicating that they should be set in italics. I would underline those that lost their underline by omission or oversight. It was redundant but it has worked.
But technology rolls ever forward, and with the internet, underlined text has become meaningful and prevalent. Underlined text when we are online indicates a hotlink. When you write a book in a world that includes the internet, there may be underlined text that should print as underlined text.
(So, yes, I do think it’s funny that I emphasized that with italics! But then, italics are supposed to be used for emphasis, my deahs.)
And now, we have all of the big publishing houses switching their editing format to digital solutions. That might not seem to be related, but bear with me for a minute. When an author delivers an electronic file of a book, any underlined text can be set as underlined (just as any italicized text can be set in italics, and bold text can be in bold, etc.) The text appears on the computer screen in the style it should appear in the book. And this is all good. This practice of digital delivery eliminates keystrokes for the typesetting and production department, minimizes errors from retyping copy and saves both time and expense in production and transport.
But it only works perfectly so long as the entire editing process is digital. Because as soon as someone prints that ms out into a hard copy (to take it home, or to give it to the copyeditor, or whatever) the underlined text will be perceived to be a command for italics. What happens next?
You guessed it – that text gets manually changed to italics.
Yup. And if/when it’s marked to be corrected and gets changed back, often there will be no underline put beneath the word spaces. If you think this is annoying, you’d be thinking right. If you’re thinking that I worry way too much about little dots and dashes, well, you’d be right about that, too.
(The other scary thing that happens when someone prints out the ms during the production cycle is that you lose version control, although this has nothing to do with typewriters. Traditionally, editors wrote on the hard copy of the ms in one colour, and the copy editor wrote on the hard copy of the ms in another colour, then the author, in reviewing these changes and suggestions and queries, wrote on the ms in a third colour. Word processing applications replicate this by letting each person who reviews the ms be assigned a colour, and his/her notes etc. appearing in the right margin or in the text in that colour. But what happens if you print out the ms at any point in time? Right – the changes are all “accepted” by the software, or at least they disappear from view, and you lose version control of each step of the editing process. Changes are presented to the author as a fait accompli without any flags or queries – the text is different than it was initially but the only way to know that is to compare both files line by line, and then there’s no data trail as to who made the change. Oopsie.)
We’re moving to digital solutions, but the typewriter’s shadow is still pretty long.
Deborah Cooke: Author 