We want to wish everyone we do business with a very happy Christmas.

That doesn't just mean our clients, but also all our authors, editors, artists, indexers, printers and anyone else and who has helped produce one of publications over the past year.

We are closed for business on Monday 27 and Tuesday 28 December, and again on Monday 3 and Tuesday 4 January 2011.

Only a few members of staff have chosen to work between Christmas and New Year. Normal service resumes on Wednesday 5 January 2011.

We will be closed from 1 pm this Friday, 17 December, for our Christmas Lunch.

Our situation has improved and most people are working more or less normally this week. A few members of staff are working at home or making up time using our flexible working arrangements.

At present, we consider the impact on clients to be relatively minor, and certainly not as bad as we expected might be the case a week ago. If your project has been affected then we ask for your understanding while we catch up.

The bad weather continues and it remains cold and icy here in Perth (this morning it was −17ºC). We expect an improvement towards the end of the week.

The bad weather continues. Several staff are snowed in or unable to travel to work because roads or bridges are closed to traffic.

Where possible, those affected are working from home. Inevitably, however, some projects will be delayed until things improve.

If you are one of our clients, editors or authors then your understanding during this difficult period will be appreciated.

Make hay while the sun shines... or the snow falls.

We have been able to forge ahead with our software upgrade programme more quickly than expected because so many people have been absent from the office. We now have 12 people on Office 2011 and 15 on Acrobat X Pro. Everyone else will follow after Christmas.

In addition, every Mac workstation has a complete makeover. Every update to Creative Suite 5 has been applied. Our electronic calendar software has been upgraded. New maintenance and utility software has been installed. And our IT boffin even smiled once this morning.

We are currently experiencing severe weather conditions here in Perth.

It is possible that some staff may be unable to get to work during the next few days, as several are based some distance outside the city. If you are one of our clients then we ask you please to accommodate any delays that arise from bad weather.

Safety first.

We should have 12 people upgraded to Office 2011 by the end of November. Everyone else will be upgraded from January 2011 onwards.

We also expect to have most, if not all, staff on Acrobat X Pro by Christmas.

This continues our long-standing policy of investing in the latest or most functional software so that our staff can provide the best service possible to clients.

We're expecting some visitors from various local groups in Scotland later this afternoon. It's always nice to meet colleagues who work in publishing.

Let's hope that no one asks a question that we can't answer.

Three members of our management team will be in London in mid-November to visit one of our larger clients.

If you would like one of them to call in and discuss a potential project then please get in touch and we will try to arrange a mutually convenient time.

The theme of our final competition is untranslatable Scoticisms. Get your entry in before noon on Friday!

Find out what's happening by following us on Twitter (@prepressperth).

We're republishing this news item as so many clients have commented on it (and it's not that everyone has said how good-looking we all are, only that it allows them to put a face to name).

___________

We replaced our Twitter photo today with a picture of our management team. Well, all, that is, but one team member, David, chief boffin and Technical Director, who took the photograph.

Who's who?

Well, that's Andrew Davidson at the back. Andrew heads up our humanities team and has been with the company just under 6 years. He is one of the company's most experienced project managers.

At the front, left to right, we have Catriona Vernal, Lucy Harrier, and Helen MacDonald.

Cat heads up our science production team and has been with the company just over 3 years. Among her other responsibilities, she is the editor of a technology transfer journal we produce for the Welsh Assembly Government.

Lucy is Publishing Manager and as such is the senior manager in the business. She is responsible for producing HTA Journal, which at over 12,000 pages annually requires its own dedicated team. She also manages our editorial office business and is responsible for human resources across the whole business.

Helen is our Managing Director. She started the company almost 20 years ago as a freelance editor. There are now 19 people in the Prepress Projects including copy-editors, production editors, designer/typesetters and editorial office specialists.

We want to recommend Tritomson, a small but very capable company based in Manila that produces consistently high-quality work using Adobe Creative Suite.

They understand both print and digital publishing. They are easy to deal with.

If you are looking for a first-class typesetting supplier based in the Philippines then look no further.

... begins on Monday 20 September.

Find out more, including who won previous competitions, by following us on Twitter (@prepressperth).

... there's a comp about.

Our next competition will begin on Monday 13 September. Find out more by following us on Twitter (@prepressperth).

The theme of the competition is spelling and grammar mnemonics. Get your entry in before noon on Friday!

If you follow us on Twitter (@prepressperth) you will notice that we are running a weekly competition throughout September to celebrate the launch of our promotional mousemat.

A new competition theme will be announced each week. Each competition (apart from the first one) will open on Monday at noon and close on Friday at noon (BST). The winner will be announced by 4 pm each Friday.

The first theme is great public misspellings and it closes at noon on Friday 10 September.

To enter you have to tweet your response to our theme. Your tweets must be tagged with #prepresscomp for them to be entered into the competition. Anyone (except our employees) can enter but you have to do it via Twitter.

The tweeter of the best tweet (as judged by our management team) will receive £20 worth of Amazon vouchers, which we will send via email to the winner.

Get started here. Remember the tag! #prepresscomp

When you receive service from a supplier above and beyond what might be reasonably expected it is only right to give credit.

We would like to recommend Graham Every, a developer specialising in XML conversions that have to meet the needs of specific DTDs, to any organisation that has to to implement complex conversion from InDesign to XML. If you work with him then you will not be disappointed.

We've just bought our first iPad. Very impressed. We're fighting over it.

Great for impromptu presentations to clients and others.

The murderer of our managing director, Hermione McDougall, was revealed as our very own social media consultant, Cate Springer.

Cate's dastardly deed was uncovered by Rhonda Baker, a proofreader in our legal department.

Our annual company outing is on Sunday 18 July. This year's outing will take the form of a murder mystery.

Over 20 staff and guests will be out and about in Perth and area looking for clues and solving them. If you see anyone with a deerstalker and magnifying glass then you'll know who they work for.

The denouement will take place towards the end of the afternoon and be followed by food and refreshments.

We have ordered our first Quad-Core 27-inch iMacs.

These are for our design and typesetting team. Amazing processors. Loads of main memory. Some of us can hardly wait.

Finding InDesign CS5 slow when using features such as Span Columns and Balance Columns?

Go to InDesign | Preferences | Interface and under Options set Live Drawing to Delayed or Never. 

Delayed is the same as CS4. Never will probably make things a bit faster. But Immediate might make ID run slowly on Macs older than a year or two. It is set on by default. This fix should bring about radical performance improvement.

From the help manual:

Live Screen Drawing Select an option to determine whether the image redraws as you drag an object. If Immediate is selected, the image redraws while you drag. If Never is selected, dragging an image moves only the frame, and then image is moved when you release the mouse button. If Delayed is selected, the image redraws only if you pause before dragging. Delayed offers the same behavior as in InDesign CS4.

Good news on the promotion front: one of our production editors, Petra Abbam, will become a senior production editor on 1 August.

Petra has been with us for 2 years and is a graduate in Computer Science and French.

This is fun. Click a word in the left column then click its synonym in the right column. When you are finished, click Get Answers to see how well you did. Good luck!

Our upgrade to Adobe Creative Suite 5 is more or less complete.

The first projects we are producing with CS5 are already in proof. New features such as Span columns and Keep with previous are being put to good use.

One of our team leaders, Catriona Vernal, took her team on an away-day yesterday, to visit Luath Press in Edinburgh and ScotPrint and Hunter & Foulis in Haddington. We extend our thanks to everyone involved at these organisations.

They brought back the following happy memory.

More good news on the promotion front: one of our senior production editors, Andrew Davidson, will soon take up his new role of Publishing Team Leader.

Andrew has been with us since December 2004, having previously worked for a Cambridge-based translating company. He is a graduate of Edinburgh University, where he studied English Language and Literature, and of Cambridge University, where he gained a PhD in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic.

When writing about bacteria, the binomial nomenclature scheme should be used, i.e. a genus name and a species name. Both parts are conventionally set in italic type.

The genus name begins with a capital but the species name does not.

Examples include Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli and Clostridium difficile. The genus name can also be abbreviated to the initial letter followed by a full point and a space, i.e. S. aureus, E. coli or C. difficile. The species name should not be abbreviated, so avoid C. diff.

Watch out for redundancy when following a set of initials with the word for which the final initial stands.

A beautiful example would be the sentence I went to the ATM machine at the TSB Bank and keyed in my PIN number.

Similarly, asap if possible and please RSVP.  This is called is called RAS syndrome.

We have a new mission: to save the world's media from embarrassment.

We want to teach the world some basic science, one word or phrase at a time.

Let's start with carbon dioxide. The chemical formula is CO₂. First note that CO₂ is the chemical formula, not the abbreviation (that would be CD, wouldn't it?).

So, it's capital C (the chemical symbol for carbon, an element), capital O (the chemical symbol for oxygen, another element), not a zero, then a subscript 2 to indicate that there are two atoms of oxygen in the molecule. The digit should always be subscript, not on the line and never superscript.

To make this clear, the following are all wrong: CO2, C02 and CO².

Reticent is often used when reluctant or hesitant would be more appropriate. 

Reticent means taciturn or uncommunicative:

He was reticent about his wartime experiences.

You can't be reticent to do something:

They were reticent to agree.

would be better phrased as

They were reluctant to agree.

Note the spelling. It's not Plexiglass.

By special request from one of our clients...

This is a tricky one as both affect and effect can be used both as a noun and as a verb. Usually, however, if a verb is being used then affect is correct and if a noun is being used effect is correct.

Affect
As a verb, affect means to influence or to adopt a pose or manner.

The outcome of treatment is affected by patients' degree of compliance.

The girl affected a couldn't care less attitude.

As a noun affect means an emotional state. It is rarely encountered outside the realm of psychiatry. So, most people are unlikely ever to use affect as a noun; however, you may well come across it in medical titles.

Effect
We don't think anyone is likely to have difficulty in comprehending the usual meaning of effect: something brought about; a result.

The effect of treatment was an improvement in patients' quality of life.

But effect may also be used as a verb, meaning to cause to happen.

The drugs effected a significant improvement in patients' quality of life.

A benefactor provides largesse and a beneficiary is the recipient of it.

The above combination of letters is very common in scientific terminology. More often than not one of the consonants is missing, so always, always check. For example

ophthalmology
diphtheria (caused by Corynebacterium diphtheriae)
phenolphthalein
naphthalene

Other combinations, e.g. chth, are possible.

ichthyology

We have a vacancy for a production editor with a science degree and relevant experience.

If you are interested in working for us then have look at our current vacancies.

Please apply by Friday 12 March 2010.

Patients are people, as are children, subjects, the elderly, etc.

All of these groups should be referred to using who or whom, not which or that.

More good news on the promotion front: one of our senior production editors, Catriona Vernal, will soon take up her new role of Publishing Team Leader.

Catriona has been with us since July 2007, having previously worked as a production editor in Edinburgh. She is a graduate of Glasgow University, where she studied Scottish History and Celtic Civilisation. Among other responsibilities, Catriona's team will produce Advances Wales, a technology transfer magazine that we produce for the Welsh Assembly Government in Cardiff.

We have promoted Dr Lucy Harrier to the post of Publishing Manager.

In her new role Lucy will have responsibility for editorial office services and journal production for both public sector and commercial clients. Lucy has been with the company for almost 7 years, and previously was one of the company's publishing services managers.

This is such a common error that we have decided to harp on about it again.

Comprise means contains or consists of. First, it is never, ever, followed by of. Second, the whole of something comprises its parts.

In contrast, the parts of something constitute, or make up, the whole.

Right: Audiences comprise ordinary people.
Wrong: Audiences are comprised of ordinary people.

Right: Ordinary people constitute the majority of theatre goers.
Wrong: Ordinary people comprise the majority of theatre goers.

A countable noun can be singular or plural, e.g. book/books, person/people.

An uncountable noun does not have a plural form, e.g. information, sugar, respect.

Less is used with uncountable nouns and fewer with countable nouns. I have less information about that because I have fewer books on that subject.

One of our project managers recently came across the use of ex-patriots in a manuscript, which should, of course, be ex-patriates.

This is typical of the the type of mistake that professional copy-editing can correct.

averse means having a dislike of or opposition to something. You can be averse to risky investments.

adverse means harmful or unfavourable. You can experience adverse weather while on a protest march.

You can’t experience averse criticism, only adverse criticism.

Similarly, you can’t be adverse to alcohol, beetroot or cats, only averse.

We collect amusing book and journal article titles. Here are some from microbiology textbooks:

Stealth and mimicry by deadly bacterial toxins. 

Clostridium botulinum: A bug with beauty and weapon. 

Post-pasteurian cultures: the microbiopolitics of raw-milk cheese in the United States.

Fuzzy species among recombinogenic bacteria.

Maybe not up to Horace Bent's high standards but we're trying.

The latter is more commonly encountered than the former even though it is usually the former that is meant.

forego means to go before or precede

You are unlikely to come across this usage very often, except in the phrase a foregone conclusion. You cannot, for example, forego your breakfast, walk in the park or pre-dinner cocktail.

forgo means to to do without

If the weather is poor, we will have to forgo our ascent of Ben Vorlich.

If you would like to see Academic Business Collaboration, a supplement to Advances Wales, the magazine that we write, edit, design and typeset for the Welsh Assembly Government in Cardiff, then have a look here.

Advances Wales has a circulation of over 10,000, with an international readership consisting of key global players in industry, academia, research & development and investment. 

We handle all aspects of production: from journalism and picture research right through to delivery of final files for the printer and web publication.

Our updated site has scored 8.2 on Nibbler and in fact appears in the top third of Nibbler's top 100 sites. Our score includes a rating of 10 out of 10 in the technology category.

Very pleasing, considering that we haven't even finished our site redesign yet.