Sunday, December 03, 2006

Tropical Horticulture and Gardening being printed

Finally it looks as if the book is being printed, after weeks of excuses. I think the Printer was under pressure to rush other books and I got pushed out of the queue.

The latest printing technology is a lot better than the old technology using metal type (I am refering to the 1960s when I edited a forestry journal) but there are some new dangers in the system. In the days of metal type, each time we corrected a proof, the obsolete version would be destroyed. Now the obsolete versions hang around in the digital realm somewhere in the computer memory and come back inexplicably to haunt us. Last week, we decided to look at the latest printout and found wrong pictures on some pages, unauthorized font changes, a missing line and a repeated line. I also found an embarrassing typo that was missed in proof-reading, but I decided to live with it, so as not to cause any further delay.

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