This is my latest tips and tricks, written for the Editors Victoria newsletter.
One of the funny things about working as a freelance editor is that often you are not sure how familiar your author or client is with some of the software and techniques we tend to take for granted. Even editors vary in how familiar with are with features in Word, like styles, macros and templates. And I’m constantly amazed at the imaginative ways editors and others mark up PDFs.
Last week, for example, an author couldn’t see my comments in a Word document I had copyedited with Track Changes until I pasted them right into the text and highlighted them – clearly not something you’d want to do for a document of any length. As this was just a quick, one-off piece I didn’t delve further into what they knew (or didn’t know) about Track Changes in Word. But perhaps they weren’t using Word, or perhaps they were using a device that presents documents quite differently from what I am used to.
I don’t have a quick solution to that problem in Word beyond communicating with the client, and perhaps educating them in how to use Track Changes. But I do have a PDF mark-up tip.
