Re: For your entertainment: sad tale of woe

From: jg70124 (jg70124_at_nospamyahoo.com)
Date: 01/18/05 

Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 00:01:04 -0500

"Jay Freedman" <jay.freedman@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:e0zJS0m%23EHA.2180@TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
> OMG! You have my utmost sympathy.

Thanks

>
> Look over the unformatted material and compare it to the formatted
chapters.
> It *might* be quicker to transfer the changes into the formatted files
than
> to format the unformatted ones -- but take into account the likelihood of
> transcription errors.

Not really feasible - there's something like 1000 pages, all tolled, and one
of things that happened is the temp took out all the automatic pagination
and double spacing, and added in all the graphics (which the publisher
wanted in a separate file). She also used double ^p to mark the end of
paragraphs, all though a cursory glance gives me the impression she missed
at least 1/3 of the paragraphs. So I can't really do an automatic compare,
and the thought of doing it manually is horrifying.

> If you're ever tempted to work for these professors again, or anyone like
> them, get a stipulation in your contract that you can charge a healthy
> premium for boneheaded things like this.

Well, I'm getting author credit and a share of the back end... since the
process of putting all their material into an outline actually involved
many, many meetings in which we all sat around a table considering what they
were really trying to do.

>
> --
> Regards,
> Jay Freedman
> Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
>
> jg70124 wrote:
> > I've posted about my situation before, and got lots of good
> > responses. Now, however, no responses are required - I am just
> > posting to vent.
> >
> > I'm working on a book with two professors of marketing, both older,
> > both significantly less skilled with their computers than they think
> > they are. There are also a bunch of other people involved: a research
> > assistant, an editor, a consultant, and the publisher. There are
> > Macs and Windows machines, and Word versions from 97 to 2003.
> >
> > My job was to help the professors put their (disorganized) material
> > in some sort of order, and to format the chapters (20) for the
> > publisher. To do that, I put the material into an outline, created a
> > style ***, removed all the character formatting, and applied the
> > new styles. That took about 6 weeks. I did it at the beginning of
> > the process, and since no one else on the project had any
> > understanding of styles, I became the de facto "keeper of the
> > format". Which means that when ever anyone changed anything, they
> > had to pass the material back to me to fix the format - I've been
> > doing it for about 7 months now.
> >
> > Last week, the lead author made a bunch of last minute changes, so he
> > gave me the chapters this morning and asked me to do a final sweep of
> > the formatting. When I opened the first chapter, I discovered - much
> > to my horror - that the styles were gone. The footnotes (100's per
> > chapter) were disconnected. The captions and cross references were
> > broken. The document was all character formatted.
> >
> > It turns out that at some point last fall, the lead author (who
> > doesn't know styles) decided he didn't like the formatting (despite
> > the fact that it was ordained by the publisher), so he hired a word
> > processing temp to do a reformat. And it turns out she didn't
> > understand Word styles either. So she converted all the materials in
> > all the chapters to plain text, then applied character formatting.
> > Since the author has been happily making changes to these plain text
> > versions, we can't go back.
> >
> > So now I'm sitting here thinking about spending 3-4 weeks re-doing the
> > formatting, rebuilding the footnotes, and recreating the tables.
> >
> > Lesson learned: for the next book (starting in a week or so), leave
> > the thing in plain text until the last possible minute.
>
>