The ones I have turn out to be rougher than I thought. If I could get some volunteers to divvy that book up and scan the chapters…that would be lovely.
I’m going to have to beg help on the Heavy Time files.
by CJ | Dec 18, 2009 | Journal | 29 comments
29 Comments
Submit a Comment Cancel reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Rather than do that, I suspect that there are already scanned and crudely proofed versions available on BitTOrrent and UseNet’s ebook groups.
I would ask someone with access to the UseNet ebook binary groups to find Cherryh books, download, and send them to you.
Then you can have volunteers proof the files against the hardcopy.
😆 all 4 of you volunteers write to me: cj@cherryh.com. This is too poetic.
CJ, I would be pleased to scan in Heavy Time chapters. I’ll start this weekend. Anyone else?
Alternatively, if you wanted to email a file, it might go faster to have me check that against the book I have. How rough are they?
CJ, I’d be ever so happy to help out. Just let me know exactly what I need to do and I’ll get right on it!
My scanner is still not installed, but I’d be pleased to help check an emailed file, like skitterling said. Jane’s got my mail-address from my CC order today.
I’m said to have a teacher’s eye for mistakes in written text, so even though I’m not a native speaker I think I’d be able to do a good job.
CJ, I’m having quite a bit of time off (furlough days… ) so I’d be very happy to help. Just let me know!
E-mail me. 😉
Do you need anyone to proof copy? Someone who knows copyediting principles and has worked with typesetters, designers (magazine) etc. Mind you I can’t set/kern type, etc., but can point out problems. Perhaps printout proof sheets and go over them, maybe fax back to you? Sure easier to see queries and suggested changes that way without mucking up master files.
But you may be able to do this faster where you are.
Also, I could at most work on it 2-3 hours a day during downtime. Guess I could buy a copy (or check out of library if recently out of print?) for some of this as an original to compare the new copy against.
Or I could suggest changes in a funny typeface in a file (a copy, not master I presume. But I still think comparing suggested changes made on a hard copy is faster for you guys.
I assume as administrators you can get my name and e-mail account from the info page when I signed up.
Reptile, bless you, I think we’ve gotten it handled. I’ve got enough volunteers and I think we are launched.
It may not be the last time I have to call for volunteers, however, and you guys are in my memory as go-to people.
I am pretty sure she only needs some of us to do with Heavy Time that we did with Hellburner: scan in a chapter, put it through a character recognition program and then proof the mistakes that the computer made trying to understand the text.
I have family over and am getting a daughter ready to move to Alberta, Canada. So, I won’t be of much use this time.
However, if the need is still there later, after Shli returns to her home in Colorado, I may be able to offer assistance.
[OT: Spence, give Shli and the babies their virtual granny’s seasonal wishes!]
Thanks, Kokipy!
If you still need help, I’d be happy to pitch in.
Thanks so much for offering and I’ll remember you on the next one. I think we’ve got it covered.
I’m here also and up for more scanning if you should need me.
I would offer but when I was switched to wireless a slight glitch arose,I can receive email I just
can’t send. So,to paraphrase a TV ad “What comes
to Azure stays with Azure”!
Wish I were knowledgeable enough to help with nuts and bolts stuff (sigh)! Something else to learn this winter! Snow is coming. Azureblu, hope your email problems get sorted! 😉
Best nutznbolts I know for webwork is Namo Webeditor—relatively cheap, basic, and stable, with both a wizzywig and pure html and steps in between. Pretty intuitive, too. FTP’s (sends to the internet) with a few button pushes and is very stable in that operation too. If you want to learn webwork, I’d recommend that program. It won’t do exotic things that leave messy code in your files (unlike the now-defunct Frontpage)…it writes clean, and if you ever have a wordprocessing file that’s got some bit of formatting stuck in its craw that you can’t dislodge, shoot it over to Namo, go into the splitscreen text/html view, and you’ll spot the problem. Better, in the html side of that screen, you can nuke it. A good companion is HTML for Dummies, no kidding: it was my text when I was learning code.
The very best tool of all for HTML is a text editor designed to be used by programmers that supports HTML.
They color code the tags. They do tag balancing–that is, if a tag is not closed or not opened, you get an alert and a line number.
The color coding alone is huge in terms of ease of use. It makes it much much easier to see what’s going on.
They tend to have smart support for CSS.
They let you know, based on the standard you use (HTML 4.0.1 Transitional or whatever in the doc declaration), whether or not you are in compliance. They have utilities to strip code from a file or a section, to remove the invisible code characters like end of line, and end of file that are inserted by MSWord and other programs, they can covert to ASCII, they understand that curly/smart/printer’s quotes go in pairs . . .
They allow you to preview the tags in the application, or to send it to several browsers at once, so you can check. Some even emulate, so you can check for I.E.7.
You can also do things like open an RTF file (RTF files are really ASCII text with a funky header), and using search and replace convert it to HTML quite rapidly.
Many text editors are cheap or free.
For Macs, the very best text editor is a religious issue; TextMate is gaining ground with programmers, rapidly, and supports HTML very well. BBEdit Pro is the standard. BareBones, who make BBEdit Pro offer a stripped down version without specific HTML tools for free called TextWrangler; it’s still awfully useful. BBedit isn’t cheap; it’s $125.00, $49.00 for educational users.
FrontPage, by the way, is the spawn of Cthulu.
😆 I used the spawn of Cthulu until it exploded in slime…
I learned to write code so I could clean it up. I liken this to how I learned Algebra: our book had the answers in the back and I could work anything back to the problem, because our instructor refused to explain anything. Frontpage is like that.
I’m actually pretty fast at editing html—accurate, I dunno, but at least it doesn’t explode or fail to run. What you name would be really nice:Namo will alert you if you have unmatched things, like span statements or brackets. Once I got its FTP figured, the editing part was nice.
I’m the Webmaster for a site for writers that has thousands of pages done in the Spawn of Cthulu. I’ve been hand-coding html since 1997; some of these pages make me weep.
All of my Cherryh printed books are in storage (I only recently moved to Washington state), but I’m perfectly willing to help proof against hard copy for anything I can pick up locally, which I suspect is most everything.
It is better, as odd as it seems, to have people keyboard than scan. If you have two people keyboard the same text then use a thing called diff (built in Unix command) to compare the files, it will list ALL the differences between the two files; you then check the listed differences, and decide which is the keeper file, and make changes to that.
If you have distributed proofers against a printed master, you have two people check each section of the file; and then use diff, again, to check the files.
Mmm. interesting. I’m an old school-teacher: I have a pretty lightning diff program in my head, though nothing to what a computer can do. {One of my students spotted me grading papers, and flipping through and assigning grades at a fast, page-turning clip. Student challenged me on it (rightly so) and I said, “Here, here’s the correct text. You go over them.” Student compared for about 30 min. I hadn’t missed a single error. But there’s an underhanded trick to that: you check those LIKELY to be missed first, and if they were right on those, you can relax on the rest. Sneaky, but effective.) Unfortunately NOTHING can predict a typesetter’s butter fingers or find all the places italics can be omitted in a long manuscript. I feel better if I go over them word for word.
The only problem with that is hypnosis: you know what OUGHT to be there—I can still cite the rest of the line for things I wrote in 1975—and unfortunately your eye fills in the correct thing, not what’s actually there.
That’s another place where a computer beats the human eye all over.
Your internal checking algorithm is a but like the reality of the famous “brown M&M clause” – which was for exactly that purpose – if there were brown M&Ms in the backstage bowl, they knew the stage management hadn’t really read the contract, and would thus have to check the important things (like “is the stage floor strong enough to support the setup”)
You didn’t mention a deadline: would Christmas be too late?
I’ve done the first few chapters and I’m getting faster at it – had to learn how to mark things in .htm first, but with Notepad++ I think it works. and don’t show up as italics, but I guess they’re only there so you know where to put the real code?
Other things I’ve marked as . (full stop was missing) or I (I had been misscanned as Z). Is that OK?
Notepad++ numbers each paragraph as a line, and I can easily keep a list of which line-numbers I’ve had to mark something unusual in (e.g. not the standard italon-shipsname-italoff combination that’s easily searched-and-replaced): would that be helpful?
That’s fine.
Oh dear it removed everything between the smaller than -larger tan signs, so the middle of that comment doesn’t make any sense.
I’ll try again but replace the triangular marks with curly brackets for this post: please read the curls as straight angles.
{ITALON} and {ITALOFF} and don’t show up as italics, but I guess they’re only there so you know where to put the real code?
Because of the italics-code not working as code, I’ve marked other things as {ADD}. (full stop was missing) or {CHANGE Z TO}I (I had been misscanned as Z).
Any such changes I noticed I marked with a comment in capital letters between the smaller-than and larger-than signs. Is that OK, or does that mess up your htm-editor?