Text validation and data cleansing

Process

Once you have completed the manuscript preparation of your book is, it is time to submit it to the responsible programme planner.
We would like to point out again that your text needs to be completed in terms of orthography, style, content and form when submitted. This means that it needs to be edited down to the smallest details and that all of your images and graphics must be complete and in sufficient quality. Also, the legal situration must be clarified.
After submission, your manuscript goes through our editorial management. There it gets examined, adjusted and fully prepared for the layout process. Usually, this takes up to approximately 4–6 weeks. Please note that this formal editing does not equal proofreading or a thorough editing.
After this, our editorial management will contact you, possibly with some queries or questions, and send you the formally edited version of your manuscript. It is this version that is getting your approval for typesetting.

At this stage you have the last opportunity for textual and editorial changes within your manuscript. Once the typesetting process has begun, this will no longer be possible.
If you publish an edited volume, you might want to submit the contributions to each contributor at this point for a final approval of their content in order to avoid potential costly corrections during the layout process.
The later page proof is only to correct mistakes that occurred due to the layout process itself (i.e. wrong divisions, unclean microtypography, mistakes in column titles, wrong placement of images).

Our technical copy editing unifies and cleans up the manuscript for example with regard to typographical details. Here are a few example to let you know what this means:

Spacings between common abbreviations (such as i.e., e.g., after p., before f. and ff.) are unified.
Quotation marks are brought – according to the language – into the right typographical form. Your differentiation between single and double variants will be adopted.
Apostrophes – regardless of whether they are entered as inch marks or similar – are converted to the correct form.
Hyphens and from-to-dashes differ in their length. However, you do not need to mind that during writing, we will adapt them for you.
Spacing before and after ellipsis are checked.
Doubled spaces are adjusted.

After the technical copy editing we transfer the manuscript into a typesetting conform template in order to technically prepare it for the layout process.

We proof the heading levels and format them in a way that they can directly be applied into the layout.
We put image containers at the position where you inserted the captions for your images as well as alternative texts during manuscript preparation. These containers indicate where the images are supposed to be placed in the layout process and which caption and alternative text needs to be inserted for each image.
Tables will be checked technically and prepared for the layout.
Block quotations will be marked up.
If your text contains lists, we define them aus such. We will also make sure that the correct bullet points or numbering are used in the layout process.
Intentionally inserted blank spaces will be marked up as such, other mark ups or special characters will be checked etc.

We will add a comment for every instance that we notice during this formal editing process within the manuscript.
More information on how to work with the pre-layout formatting can be found here: