I have a paper accepted by a journal of Elsevier, and it went under production for 3 months. Yet the production team has not been able to fix certain problems with typesetting which appeared during the proofreading. After the first month, I received the proofreading notification. The first production of my paper was really bad: a lot of errors in equations, symbols, figures and tables. So I prepared and submitted a lengthy list of request for correction, with as much information as possible.
A few days later, I received a strange email from the journal manager (who is said to be affiliated with Elsevier Global Journals Production), telling me that the production team has to ignore my request as it may cause them too much trouble. I gave a full explanation to this manager about how bad it is with the production and the request has to be processed. In the end, the manager agreed to make the corrections.
Two or three weeks later, my paper went directly online (early access), with all the typesetting problems unfixed, and even had some extra new problems. I was very worried because my paper DOI already took effect. I never heard of a paper which is already put online (for public download) can be fixed again. The journal manager apologized to me, saying that the production team was busy with other papers, but they will fix the problems and get back to me with another proofreading. Two months have passed, and I have yet to receive my second proofreading.
I fear the production team is just trying to avoid the proofreading by intentionally postponing, in an attempt to reach a point where it becomes officially impossible to make changes. As a matter of fact, my paper's official issue date is coming near, and the production team is probably already planning to have an early Christmas.
Question
What shall I do to change the result?
NOTE 1: And NO, it is not about aesthetics.
NOTE 2: I am not trying to be a PITA. Considering that I contributed a lot to Elsevier by being a frequent and responsible reviewer and yet received a very poor production of my paper, I am simply very disappointed.
The following is a demonstration of the kind of work I receive on my own paper. An altered equation is manufactured to accurately reflect a true situation.
Original equation: 
Production: 
Concluding remarks
I would like to thank all the people who have offered me valuable suggestion. As a matter of fact, after I posted this question here yesterday, I received a notification email, that I have been waiting for, for proofreading today. There are still many unsolved problems, but at least it is a good start. I would like to think my post somehow helped change the situation for the better.
My OP and comments might have caused some confusion and probably even dissatisfication as my posts usually do. It is probably because: I did not spend hours writing down every bit of details about the whole situation; I am not a native user of English language. But maybe most of all, because I was a little bit angry and that could be contageous. Therefore, my apologies. On the other hand, there is really no need for some of the repliers to call me a ranter. It is a hurtful language. I get that you are experts on this and many more forums and can't wait to show people your expertise. However,You really did not help and you have wasted your time. Please do yourself a favor and leave me alone.
About my attitude toward Elsevier, I'm not saying Elsevier this and that. It is probably one of the oldest publishers around, and probably the biggest contributer to dissemination of knowledge (its pricing policy being another matter). I am saying what it is: they messed up my paper and the first thing their production team did is to persuade me to give up trying to make corrections. I have worked with almost all the major publishers, and never have I encountered such a situation. To Elsevier from a contributor, you should hire more people for your production team, and I don't know, pay them more?
Lessons learned:
Don't expect the Elsevier production team to look into your TeX file, such as noticing the specified width/height of figures. You need to deliver a foolproof source package to them. In particular, Set BB size to actual figure size in the paper (ghostscript could do the job).
Elsevier production team doesn't like table cell shadings, not even non-cosmetic shadings (It should probably be put down in the instruction).
Elsevier team is not very good with math fonts. One should probably write an instruction of the symbols used in his/her paper.
Update
The manager got back to me again, much quicker this time, with an update. And they did the cell shading for me this time. Just so you know they didn't consider cell shading as "definitely violating" any standards. Not that I encourage people to use cell shading.
Update in 2018
I had the chance to work with the same journal again this year. I have to say the situation with the production team has improved dramatically! They respond much more quickly and the proofreading is much more professional (the software they use seem to have improved too). Many thanks to them (although I could not and probably should not name the journal) and Elsevier for the fine service they provide now.
This result is made possible, probably also because of the extensive measures I took to pre-process all figures, which I'd like to share here:
As most people know, transparency is usually flattened before the final production. However, hand in transparent figures directly to publishers will usually cause unforeseen results, due to the software incompatibility. My suggestion would be to manually reduce your figures to only two layers, one with all vector graphics, the other below it containing a rasterized version of all transparent objects (along with other raster contents). It is also suggested to simplify the vector graphics for smaller file size and faster onscreen generation. It might help to emphasize this to the production team too.
It occurs to me that figure sizing as in \includegraphics[width=...,height=]{figure} are sometimes unfortunately ignored in production. Therefore, it is suggested that one compiles all his or her figures separately, using \documentclass[multi=< environment name for starting a new page >,preview]{standalone} so that the figures are properly resized before being inserted back into the paper using \includegraphics{figure}, i.e., without size specification.
Hope that helps.
Answer
You could try contacting the editor in chief of the journal to see if they could get the problem fixed. This worked for me when I had similar problems with a paper last year.
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