[bksvol-discuss] Re: Stripping headers
- From: "Monica Willyard" <rhyami@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:44:42 -0500
Just one caveat to add here. If you're going to experiment with using search
and replace to remove headers, keep a back-up copy of your file. That way
you can recover easily if the results of your replacing don't work as you'd
planned.
I use the method that Jamie and Evan do for most books. I'd be less likely
to do it with a book of short stories though. I came to this decision the
hard way. I was doing a volume of mysteries and used find and replace to
strip the headers, making sure to include the tab character. I thought I'd
outsmarted the book and would save lots of time. Unfortunately, there was an
afterward, a list of copyright dates and publications for each story, and a
bibliography at the end of the book. There were tabs between the titles and
authors' names there. My replacing stripped out the author names as well as
the titles that were referenced in the afterward. It wasn't my finest
proofreading moment. I didn't realized what I'd done until I'd already put
in a lot of additional work on the book. I had to start over, and that
wasn't much fun.
Now I keep a back-up copy of my file in a separate folder, and I make a
saved back-up before doing any global replacing. Once I'm done proofreading,
I save my proofread and original back-up file until it's approved by Carrie.
That probably sounds a little obsessive. (grin) I despise doing work over,
and this practice has saved my bacon several times. It takes 10 seconds to
save a back-up file, and it could cost me 10 hours of work if I royally mess
up something globally and have to start from scratch.
Monica Willyard
"The best way to predict the future is to create it." -- Peter Drucker
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