[bksvol-discuss] proofreading questions
- From: "John Simpson" <John@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2012 17:06:10 -0700
I have several questions about the book that I am currently proofing. First
off, words that are followed by an "'s" have the apostrsphe over the
penultimate letter (e.g. Martin̓s). While this is not a showstopper, it does
require a fair amount of corrections. I guess my question is what causes this
kind of construction? Is it a function of the scan volunteer, the scanner
hardware, or the OCR software?
Secondly, I have gone to books.google.com to take a look at this book. My
question here is whether Google has a fair representation of the book. I know
that all but one page are present, but within the first several chapters, the
page breaks in the scanned version .rtf are not in the same place as they are
in Google's copy. I certainly don't want to have to go through the entire book
changing pagination based on Google. I do have a hold at my local library for
the print copy that will help answer this question. Any other advice would be
greatly appreciated.
The third question is that in the scanned version that I have from BookShare
there are frequent instances of two spaces, rather than one. The sense of the
book is that there should be a comma where the first space is. However, when
looking at the Google version, this separator is an m dash surrounded by
spaces. All of these dashes have been removed. Again, my question is whether
this is a function of the scan volunteer the scanner hardware or the OCR
software. Again, I do not wish to go through the entire print book looking for
dashes that I need to replace, or even to do a find on two spaces and see if
the meeting indicates a dash.
I am a sighted volunteer with physical limitations that do not allow me to
manipulate a print book. While I don't mind getting occasional assistance to go
to a specific page to verify my proofreading, I'm not able to scan a print book
and compare my scan to the BookShare .rtf version. If the Google
representation is accurate relative to the print book, I will be happy to use
that as a resource wherever possible.
Thanks for any and all suggestions.
John Simpson
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