Software alone is not enough

You might be wondering, ‘so is it enough to have the software to do the job’?

The short answer is no and here is an example why. Recently we finished typesetting a Burmese project for a charitable organization. Usually our typesetters are native speakers of the languages. But in the case of Burmese, because it is such an uncommon language to typeset and experienced Burmese typesetters are scarce, the typesetter who did it actually did not understand Burmese.

In the review process after a first draft was produced, we discovered that the equivalent of a question mark in Burmese looks similar to a smiling face in the form of a square. The draft we created still kept the original English question marks and needed to be corrected.

Mistakes like this one are hard to catch and it just shows how important it is to have a good understanding of the language you typeset.

Quality Assurance Review a must

Except for rare exceptions, it is better to have a native typesetter teamed with an experienced Quality Assurance person. A native typesetter comes in very handy not just for the initial process, but also later when changes come back. It sure helps to know the language when you insert client changes back into the document.

A crucial but sometimes overlooked role is that of a Quality Assurance (QA) reviewer. The real professional QAs have such trained eyes for errors, whether it is line breaking or truncated text in a text box. Having the QA process improves the quality of the typesetting results so much that it is definitely money well spent.

1 2 3 4