Indeed, over the years many hundreds of books have been produced from camera-ready copy provided to academic publishers by Nota Bene users. To take but one example, the multi-volume critical edition of the Princeton Dead Sea Scrolls Project, published by Mohr Siebeck, uses copy prepared using Nota Bene and a PDF printer driver. It’s not a stretch to say that Nota Bene has helped make a lot of important research available to the academic community both more quickly, and at lower cost.

This strength of Nota Bene, however, creates a series of dilemmas for us. We have historically provided free support to all users who have the current (latest) version of the program. But providing similar no-cost support for detailed questions related to specific issues, including line and page-break decisions, involved in creation of camera-ready copy, is regrettably beyond our resources.

There are a number of reasons for this:

1. While Nota Bene is often the only program that can be used in some contexts (for example, when multiple series of notes are involved, or where precise rendering of accents is required), and while one can always achieve very high-level output, almost always meeting or exceeding the specifications of the publisher, it’s important to note that Nota Bene was not designed primarily as a camera-ready page-layout system. Among other things, it does not automatically handle widows and orphans in footnotes, and these must therefore be controlled manually. While there are very few such areas where such manual intervention is required, even a single such context means that a very high level of expertise may be required in order to produce the “perfect” result that authors, presses, and readers expect.

2. Things are further complicated by the fact that in many cases no computer program or system, even those costing tens of thousands of dollars, can programmatically resolve all layout issues. As the Chicago Manual of Style notes, “a manuscript peppered with footnote references, two or more of which might fall in the last line of text on the printed page, may well be a typesetter’s nightmare. Similarly, several long footnotes . . . present a sometimes insoluble problem in any kind of page makeup (15.42). . . . [The solution] requires the cooperation of the author or editor or both (19.40).” Indeed, the typical heavily footnoted Nota Bene manuscript often requires that decisions about page breaks be made many pages in advance (in order to prevent some otherwise impossible-to-resolve composition issue further down the road), something that only a human operator can successfully do. Matters are further complicated by the sometimes quite unrealistic expectation of presses -- for example, they may want line leading (vertical spacing) to be entirely consistent (not even allowing variations of one-tenth of a point), but at the same time want constant bottom margins, and no widows or orphans in either body text or notes, thus imposing on the author the necessity of simply rewriting some of the text (shortening or lengthening paragraphs or notes, or moving or eliminating [or adding!] the latter), or else -- and many authors prefer this, since they understandably think that their finished text says what needs to be said, and in the right way -- going back (perhaps many pages) in the text and making different page-break decisions starting there so as to avoid the problematic situation at the original position.

3. One other factor needs to be taken into consideration when creating camera-ready copy. Unlike some other programs, Nota Bene makes line- and page-break decisions based on the precise font metrics (widths of specific characters in the selected size[s] in the active font[s]) of the currently active printer driver. This means that you need to have the (PDF) printer driver with which you intend to produce the camera-ready output loaded while doing final pagination; you also need to be sure that the desired PDF printer resolution is selected when doing so, since this also affects font metrics. While this fidelity to the actual fonts in use insures that Nota Bene output will look better than it will with programs that make line-break decisions based on the quite different widths of the characters at screen resolution (then expanding and shrinking the actual inter-character spacing, using the corresponding printer version of these fonts when printing), it means both that (a) the compositor must insure that the driver setup remains constant between composition sessions, and that (b) another party (most relevantly, those of us doing Nota Bene technical support) will almost certainly not be able to reproduce the precise composition that users are seeing/producing (without first spending considerable time setting up an identical configuration). This makes answering questions about specific pagination issues more difficult.

All three of these factors create a real dilemma for us: While we can provide general advice, and while, had we unlimited resources, we’d certainly like to provide assistance on specific line- and page-break decisions, we are simply unable to do so as part of our free technical support. The issues are just too complex, and too time-consuming, to allow us to do this -- spending a couple or a dozen hours on one user’s manuscript means that time is taken from helping other users, to say nothing of time that we need to spend tracking down and fixing bugs, working on documentation and the web page, and developing updated versions of the program. We truly do hate to say “no,” since we do genuinely want to be helpful, but fairness to the entire NB community requires that we not let ourselves be drawn into details on individual projects.

Where do these cautionary words leave us? There are two basic options:

1. If you feel that you are quite adept at using Nota Bene, by all means give the process of creating camera-ready copy a try -- the vast majority of camera-ready manuscripts created in Nota Bene have been produced by Nota Bene authors without any (or only very limited) assistance from us. If you are up to it, we’d certainly recommend that you try to produce your own copy. We’ll be happy to answer a few general questions along the way, so you don’t need to feel that you have to go it alone. But as the questions mount, and especially if they involve questions about specific line- and page-break decisions, we’ll need to enter into a consulting arrangement, where we’ll spend the time necessary to achieve the results you want, but for a fee (currently, $75 an hour). This will include spending the time getting our working environment to match up with yours, so that we will be able to see the precise issues which you face, thus making it is more economical for us to assist you in getting the desired results.

2. Alternatively, we can take your text and produce the finished copy for you, also on a consulting basis (the fee for this more thorough arrangement is currently $100 an hour).

We’re well aware, of course, that if the press doesn’t want to bear the costs of getting a manuscript ready for publication, and if we are not able to take up the slack for free, that it looks like you, the author, is left holding the bag, as it were. However, many presses, universities or departments, or even foundations, offer publishing subventions, so that you may not need to bear the cost personally.

One final word: Given the increasing importance and, indeed -- given the increasingly difficult economic climate -- the necessity, of authors creating camera-ready copy, we certainly intend to enhance the program going forward so that it can handle more and more of the requirements with less and less authorial intervention. (For example, while we cannot promise when we’ll be able to implement this, automatically handling widows and orphans in footnotes is something that we would hope to be able to do in the future.) But even as we enhance the program to make it more useful in this area, it’s important to remember that complex manuscripts such as almost all Nota Bene authors publish will always likely require some manual intervention.