Laptop and software for copy editing and music production?

March 27, 2023 1:55 PM

What’s a decent laptop to get for the above? Also - I haven’t worked as a copy editor for several years. Which programs are most common these days? I used to work in MS Word and Adobe InDesign.

I’m thinking a Mac product would be best?

posted by cotton dress sock to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

How heavy duty is your music production? Are you recording lots and lots of tracks at once, or using lots of software synths and/or effects on the tracks? If not, then any mac will do, even the macbook air.
posted by umbú at 2:13 PM on March 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Not more than 15 tracks (incl 2-3 audio tracks), yes would be using some synths and doing some processing. I could use an external hard drive if needed, I guess?
posted by cotton dress sock at 2:19 PM on March 27, 2023

Reaper is the go-to these days. It’s a powerhouse of a product, and it’s free.
posted by Silvery Fish at 2:59 PM on March 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

For copy editing: I work on novel-length fiction, generally, and I only use Word. The colleagues I have who might use other programs all work on much shorter writing.
posted by BlahLaLa at 3:03 PM on March 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I guess to be frank my advice would be to choose a budget, then spend that much on whatever Apple laptop costs that much. Refurbs are cheaper, last year's are cheaper, but my M1 iMac handles Ableton and plenty of tracks like a boss, and I'm sure the new M2 processor is even better.
posted by papayaninja at 4:14 PM on March 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

And I realize mine isn't a laptop, but unless you need a powerful GPU or insane amounts of RAM, I think much of the previous power discrepancy has faded (or been relegated to an affordability thing).
posted by papayaninja at 4:17 PM on March 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm a copy editor for a medical journal. In the office, we use InDesign, but our freelancers use Word.
posted by FencingGal at 6:01 PM on March 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am not a copy editor although I value their work. I have a question: I thought that InDesign was more of a page layout program, and I thought layout and copy editing were separate disciplines. Are my perceptions incorrect?
posted by TimHare at 7:44 PM on March 27, 2023

Proofing, not copy editing, tends to happen on the page (although sometimes the text on the page actually needs a copy edit in addition to a proofing). Rather than marking up PDFs and having a layout artist enter the corrections (and maybe misinterpret an editor's scribbles), a lot of places believe it is better if an editor inputs the changes directly to the text.

For companies that layout in InDesign, the options are to pay for an expensive InDesign licence for all of the editors (as well as the art department people) or buy a slightly cheaper (I think) InCopy licence. InCopy allows word people to enter text changes to pages created in InDesign but doesn't allow them to muck up the artistic decisions (like line length or text placement). Some edits can't be done in InCopy and the still have to be fixed in InDesign.

The catch, as I'm sure you've picked up, with InDesign, is that the word people have access to everything the picture people have done and can make a right mess of things if they're not disciplined about what changes they make and how they make the changes. If, however, the people on the word side of the publication are careful, then having them work in InDesign is smart as they can fix all of the text problems without having to bother the picture people. This means changing line breaks, adjusting the kerning to fix rivers in paragraphs, etc.

I've seen all PC publications (editorial and art), all Mac and mixed PC (editorial) and Mac (art and layout).

As long as you've got access to Word--don't assume all changes and edits and comments and Track Changes will work perfectly when going back and forth between LibreOffice or Google Docs and Word, then that's really all you should need on the editing side.

The layout side is going to be pretty much client dependent. Some will want marked up Word docs. Some will want marked up PDFs*. Some will want the changes made directly in their layout program of choice, so that's InDesign (or InCopy) or possibly Quark Xpress.

For the PDFs, some clients will be happy if you just have Acrobat Reader capabilities, others will want a more thoroughly edited document, then it's on you to have access to a full version of Acrobat or some other PDF editing/writing tool.

If you specialize in something like scientific publishing, then you may need to find yourself familiar with LaTeX.
posted by sardonyx at 8:20 PM on March 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

I have a question: I thought that InDesign was more of a page layout program, and I thought layout and copy editing were separate disciplines. Are my perceptions incorrect?

You're not incorrect. I just do copyediting in InDesign. The document then goes to a different department for figures and layout. After the authors send corrections, I do the copyediting corrections, still in InDesign, then it goes to the layout people to complete.

We work with specific fonts in InDesign. If you move a document from Word to InDesign, the change from Word fonts to InDesign fonts can cause problems if you're working with any kind of symbols, even something as simple as Greek letters. So when I get something back from a freelancer who is working in Word, I need to go through it, and a symbol that is fine in Word might show as a pink square in InDesign - then you have to find out what the original symbol was. It can even show up as a different symbol altogether. Once I could not figure out a weird term an author was using, and it turned out that the program changing the document to InDesign had badly misinterpreted an arrow. Having copy editors working in InDesign in the first place avoids those problems. We also use specific fonts for specific symbols, and the in-house copy editors know which fonts to use.

As sardonyx points out, the copy editors do have to know what they're doing enough to not cause problems the layout people have to fix. If I notice something like a bad break or a table that doesn't look right, I'll alert the layout people rather than trying to fix it myself.
posted by FencingGal at 7:52 AM on March 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

I bought the cheapest M1 Macbook Air when they first came out. Fine for copyediting with Office for Mac, which is all I ever needed, and fine for making music with Reaper. Obviously you can go with a more expensive model.
posted by troywestfield at 6:37 AM on March 31, 2023