Print is all-pervasive. While not everyone reads books, most people read magazines, newspapers and websites. And everyone reads the cooking instructions on the food they buy (even if they don’t use a cookery book) and, sometimes with difficulty, the instructions on self-construct furniture.
The printing industry throughout the world has an annual turnover of billions of dollars. And, yet, many people, even governments, have no concept of the process by which printed material is produced.
This in itself does not matter, but what is more worrying is that many of the people who are involved in the preparation of these materials are not aware of the correct way to mark up proofs so that corrections and changes are made in a correct and clearly understandable way. This is in spite of the fact that there have been standards for this for many years in a number of countries.
The British standard (BS 5261) was first published in 1976 and then revised in 2005. This standard specifies marks for use in copy preparation and proof correction. It shows how the customer (or editor) should mark up copy and proofs for the typesetter.
The marks specified were chosen to be relevant to the needs of all users of the standard and to reflect good trade practice. They were intended to be clear, memorable, quick and easy to reproduce, so no words, abbreviations and contractions are used as marginal marks. In other words, the marks are international and not only understandable in any one language.
There was also an international standard (ISO 5776: 1983), but this was a much shorter document including only the very basic correction marks. Cross references to the marks given in that earlier standard are given as an appendix to the current standard, the development of which is described below.
However, things have changed significantly since 2005 and certainly since 1983. Very few texts are marked up (on paper) for typesetting today as, depending on their stage of production, users’ or authors’ files are either sent to experts for editing and page make-up or indeed, direct to printers.
This means that the marks are now almost exclusively used for proofreading. In addition, some of the marks in the earlier standards are now virtually redundant as they apply only to setting in metal type. And, finally, in spite of the international aspect of the marks, the earlier standards essentially apply only to alphabetic languages.
Therefore, based on the marks in the British standard, a revised (or, to be more correct, a completely rewritten) version of ISO 5776 was developed within ISO Technical Committee TC130 and published in 2016. As is described below, the 2016 standard covers not only alphabetic languages, but also Chinese and Japanese. A revised version of the standard was published in 2022 to include Korean, which is an alphabetic language, but not one that uses the western alphabet.
So, what is new in the international standard? Three main things:
1. As noted above, it includes not only alphabetic languages, but also the logographic languages Chinese and Japanese and now, in addition, Korean.
2. The proof correction marks are given in more detail than in the British standard and the marks themselves are printed in red to distinguish them from the text being corrected (unlike the British standard, which is all in black).
3. For each correction mark an example is given, showing both the correction and the corrected text. These are summarized in appendices showing a complete text with the corrections for each language, together with a corrected version.
The changes do mean, however, that the tables of correction marks are quite extensive.
Increasingly, proof correction is carried out on screen using PDF (portable document format) files and there is no paper copy. It is, of course, still possible to print out the proof, but more often than not, this is not the preferred option, partly for operational or financial reasons.
There have been several approaches to making proof correction marks available using software and it is encouraging to note that the ISO technical committee responsible for the PDF specification has agreed in principle that facilities for the implementation of the proof correction marks should be included in the next version of the PDF specification. However, not only is this probably several years away, but it will also require a software developer to implement it in a product. In the meantime, the use of the stamp facility in PDF documents to mark up digital proofs works very well; as this example demonstrates (this is a link to a series of articles which describes how to activate the marks in for example the free version of Adobe Acrobat).
Example of proof reading symbols that can be inserted in a PDF.
Although this implementation still uses the BS 5261 marks, it could easily be updated to use the ISO 5766 marks, many of which are the same since the international standard was based on the British standard.
So, while the earlier standards continue to meet the needs of many professional proof-readers, for those new to the task the international standard provides a much clearer explanation of each proof mark. Adoption of these marks should make the production of printed material both more efficient and more accurate, as well as making international cooperation between printers and their customers a more straightforward process.