Since people started writing, this activity is perceived as work. And like any labor, the art of owning a pen is payable.
How to measure written
Mankind carved lines on a stone, then special planks covered with wax were used, and even later paper appeared on which information was recorded using ink and goose feathers. The invention of the printing method of making books created the conditions for mass replication, and quantitative assessment became an issue that was relevant not only for the authors, but also for manufacturers of this specific product, which brings knowledge to humanity.
At present, the author's sheet is considered the main unit for measuring the volume of a printed publication. Not a person dedicated to publishing matters, this term says little. For most people, a sheet is just a piece of paper with text printed on it on one or both sides. In fact, the concept is much more complicated.
Why is it called that?
The first books in the history of mankind were published in the In folio format. For this, a matrix was created on which mirrored texts and images protruded from its main plane. The technology roughly corresponded to that used to create engravings, which set the high cost of early prints. The expression in folio is literally translated from Latin literally as “to the sheet”, from which, in fact, the typographic term arose.
In typescript
In the twentieth century, writers created their works in two main ways. In addition to talent, rich imagination, life experience and high moral qualities, they needed a fountain pen or typewriter. The poet (or writer), keen on rhymes or ups and downs of the plot, was not up to counting the number of characters. He could only take into account the number of pages. Publishing enterprises quickly established compliance, according to which the volume of the author's sheet corresponds to 22-23 typewritten pages. After that, it became much easier to consider both the size of the fee and the cost of the instance, based on the circulation. The concept of a page was also subject to standardization. It is considered filled normally if it contains approximately 30 lines (plus or minus one). Moreover, in each of them there are approximately 1860 letters, symbols or spaces. The distance between the lines can be single, one-and-a-half or double, depending on this, other print parameters change, such as the number of characters in a line, the size of the fields, etc. In any case, it took about forty thousand times to hit the author sheet on the keys of a typewriter. All 23 pages should have a standard size of 29.7 x 21 cm, which corresponds to the A4 format. One-sided printing.
With computer typing
Writers of the very recent past were difficult. Edits led to damage, the texts had to be reprinted many times, then read again, find flaws, and again in a new way ... Another thing now. Convenient text editors of popular software shells facilitate the work of writers by carefully pointing out typos and syntax errors, and any editing comes down to hovering the cursor to the right place, moreover, the replacement options are already selected. Not always the consequence of such convenience is the high artistic merit of the works, but technically progress is obvious. With computer typesetting, the author sheet is equal to forty thousand characters with punctuation marks and spaces. Possibilities for statistical accounting of the volume of a work are included in the functions of all programs intended for text typing and editing. Of course, you do not need to adjust the text to a round number; approximate correspondence is enough.
There is another approximate calculation method used by modern prose writers. Just look at the properties of the document. In DOS format, one author sheet occupies a memory capacity of 34 kB.
Graphics in the copyright sheet
Everything is clear when it comes to textual information. But in real life, the situation can be more complicated. For example, most textbooks, scientific monographs, or research papers cannot be imagined without diagrams, tables, and other graphic reinforcements of the material presented. Fiction can also be illustrated. How to calculate copyright sheets in this case? This task is somewhat more complicated, but also has a solution.
Illustrative material is considered as follows: 30 dm² of their area comprise one copyright sheet. Usually each “picture” is provided with explanatory text, its volume is taken into account according to the usual rules. Thus, the proportion of illustrations is calculated by the ratio of their area to the total volume.
What is the translator sheet equal to
Translation is not easy work, and it requires not only knowledge of a foreign language, but also certain creative abilities, and in some cases talent. Samuel Marshak, Pasternak and other poets were able to convey to our reader the works of Shakespeare and other foreign authors, preserving the style, style and all the subtleties of the era in which the original sources were created. Of course, not everyone should be geniuses, but the need for high-quality translations has always been, is and will be. It is noted that the volume of the source differs from the size of the final material, therefore, by concluding a contract for this difficult work, publishers apply increasing factors. This is done simply, the size of the original copyright sheet is multiplied by a certain number. For English, the coefficient is 1.2, and for more difficult to translate Hungarian - 1.4. Of course, the final calculation is made based on the size of the final result, but it is empirically established that from one page of the Portuguese text, approximately one fifth of the larger volume of Russian is obtained.
Rhyme sheet
From the outside it seems that poets live easier. Their copyright sheet consists of 700 lines, regardless of their length and number of characters. However, such a counting system only seems profitable. If the question is about paying a fee (which happens infrequently these days), then to achieve such recognition is a difficult task in itself, and it is absolutely unattainable for cunning poets who want to make shorter lines. When publishing a work at the expense of the author, such a system, on the contrary, is more profitable for the publisher, which issues an invoice based on the number of copyright sheets.
All this, by the way, applies to prose writers. It is very difficult to create a talented work that the reader would love. Novice writers should think about this before calculating their future fees.