A proof is a printed impression taken before the run. It does not exist to show you what the job will look like; you already know that, roughly, or you would not have set it. It exists because a whole class of error only becomes visible once ink is on paper.
That distinction sounds pedantic. It is the most useful thing I learned in my first year in a print shop, and it applies to every screen I have worked on since.
Errors that only exist in the impression
A letter standing slightly high prints heavier than its neighbours. In the forme it is invisible: you can run a finger across a page of type and feel nothing. On the proof it is a dark spot in the middle of a word.
Spacing material that has risen far enough to take ink prints as a mark where there should be nothing. A wrong-fount letter, a lowercase e from a slightly different face, is invisible in the case and unmistakable on paper, because on paper you are no longer looking at letters. You are looking at the grey of the line, and the intruder changes the grey.1
None of these are errors of intention. Nobody decided to put the wrong e there. They are errors of material, and material only shows itself when it is used.
The screen equivalent
The modern proof is the built page, in a browser, at the size a reader will read it, on a machine that is not the one you built it on.
Not the design file. Not the editor preview. The built page, because the build is where the material shows itself: the font that did not load, the image that arrived at the wrong size, the line that breaks in a place nobody saw because nobody’s screen was that width.
What is harder than in print is that there is no single artefact. A book page is one object. A web page is a family of objects, one per width, and each of them is a slightly different page. So I proof at four widths, at the reader’s default type size, and then again at double the type size, because some readers read that way and a page that falls apart at double size is a page with a fault in it.
The second proof
In a print shop the important proof is not the first one. The first catches the obvious: the missing line, the transposed paragraph, the heading in the wrong face. Everybody looks at the first proof carefully.
The second, taken after the corrections, catches what the corrections introduced. And those are the errors that ship, because by the second proof everyone has stopped looking. The correction was made, the correction is visible, the job is done.
Except that a correction is a change, and a change moves things. A word added to line four pushes a word onto line five, which pushes a line onto the next page, which strands a widow at the top of it. The fix for one error has made another, three lines and one page away from where anyone is looking.
The rule
The rule I keep is simple and unenjoyable. After a correction, read the whole thing from the start, at reading speed, as a reader. Not scanning for the fix. Reading.
It takes longer than it should, and it finds something about one time in four. The one time in four is the reason there is a second proof.2
Footnotes
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Old printers called this “the colour of the page”, meaning its overall darkness, not its hue. A good compositor could spot a single wrong-fount letter across the room by the colour alone. ↩
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I keep a tally, which is the only statistic I keep about anything. Since 2021 the second proof has caught something in 64 of 251 jobs. ↩
