✍️ From manuscript to pages

A manuscript should carry structure, not formatting. Everything you styled by hand gets thrown away and re-made by the typesetter — so mark what a thing is, not what it should look like, and the import comes through clean.

Why chapters start on the right, what a sink is, why the first paragraph is not indented, and why a blank line is not a scene break in print — the conventions that make a book look like a book.

Three faults that never stop anyone reading and that no reader can name. What each one actually is, why justified text produces them, and which levers fix them and at what cost.

An image inside a book is ink on paper at a fixed size, not a picture on a screen. Resolution, plates, bleed, the black-and-white problem, captions and alt text — and why images finish before the cover.

Every writing tool has its own idea of what a document is, and the way you leave it decides how much work the typesetter has to undo. The export that works, tool by tool, and the cleanup that matters more than any of them.