Let me add something. It has been a long time since I have seen actual print and back when I did see it regularly I did not look at foreign languages that much. However, I do know that different languages have different diacritical marks. I am thinking that there is a diacritical mark in Portuguese that looks like an apostrophe that appears directly over a letter. I may have gotten the language wrong, but I do know that Portuguese does have one that is similar, but not identical, to an apostrophe that appears under some letters. What I am getting at is that before you find and replace all of those superscripted apostrophes you should be sure that there are not some of them that belong there. Do any of them appear in foreign words? If they do then what language do the words come from? It just might be that you will want to preserve some of them. To do that you should wait to finish the entire book and then do the find and replace and if there are any such instances that you want to preserve then you should figure out how to replace the ones you want to replace without replacing the ones that should stand.
On 7/28/2012 1:41 PM, John Simpson wrote:
Thanks all for the many helpful suggestions. Here are the strategies that I have adopted. For the apostrophe issue, I am doing a 'find and replace' putting the letter with the superscript apostrophe and it's following letter in the 'find' and then the letter followed by an apostrophe followed by the final letter in the 'replace' and then doing a global replace. I figure I will have to do that at most 26 times (smile). The page break difference between book.google.com and BookShare can certainly be explained by different editions of the same book, so I am going with the BookShare .rtf. So this is essentially a non-issue. I am solving the missing m-dash problem by doing a find on two spaces and then replacing it with a -- where the context indicates that was what was in the original. Having looked at the books.google.com version, it is clear to me that the author made liberal use of dashes in her writing style. Unfortunately, there are a number of double spaces that clearly do not need to be replaced with dashes, so this is a one-at-a-time process. I have also appreciated previous discussions on ellipses, which the author also uses with some frequency. It appears that this book is going to take some time to get corrected. It's a good thing I'm enjoying the book itself. Once again, thanks ever so much for all the help and suggestions. You are truly an awesome group. -----Original Message----- From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey Sent: Saturday, July 28, 2012 9:51 AM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: proofreading questions But Anne, the apostrophe belongs between the last two letters. On 7/28/2012 7:30 AM, Ann Parsons wrote:Hi all, John, I'll try to answer your questions. Perhaps others more wiser than I will do better. Original message: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).This depends on how the term is used. If it is a possessive, referring to something belonging to Martin, e.g. Martin's book, Martin's car, etc. Then leave the apostrophe where it is. Some people when referring to a family named Martin might write Martin's as in The Martin's and I went to the theater. I'd tend to leave these apostrophes too. Also if there is a character called Martin in the book the text may refer to him as: Martin's coming. Or: Martin's leaving at 10:00 you better catch him before he goes. These are all legitimate reasons for using an apostrophe, and you have to know why the apostrophe is there before you summarily nuke it.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.If the page breaks are in your text, go with them, so long as the numbering sequence is right.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.John, the M-dash needed to be removed from the text because it doesn't transfer well into the Braille files for Bookshare. What should have happened is that the scanner replace the M-dash with two hyphens, like this --. I'd do a global find and replace and replace the two spaces with two hyphens. You will probably find a couple of occasions where you've replaced these chars wrongly, but fixing five mal-replacements is better than trying to manually replace all these instances. Hope I've been helpful? If I knew more about your apostrophe problem, I could probably help better. I'd need to see the whole sentence to get the context in which the apostrophe was used. Ann P.To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line. To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.
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