Several months ago (I kind of think it was when I was recovering from my head surgery, but I'm not sure), someone scanned the book "The Continent Makers" by L. Sprague de Camp. I had to reject the book for the strangest reason I've ever come across.
In this book, creative spelling is used to represent the accents of both humans and alien beings. The scanner took a lot of trouble to "correct" all those "misspellings." I felt extremely bad about rejecting the book because someone put in "too" much work on "fixing" this scan. I was really hoping the original scanner would, embarrassed though he or she might be, resubmit the book, "uncorrected."
Well, that hasn't happened and since I have a copy of the book, and it really is one of de Camp's most delightful sets of stories, I have scanned and submitted it. This could be a case where Kurzweil's ranked spelling could really help. So, for whoever decides to proof this book, if a word is spelled the same wrong way many times, it's probably intentional, especially if hearing it aloud it sounds like the character has a terrible accent.
One other oddity, whenever the word airplane is shortened to just plane, there is an apostrophe in front of the word 'plane. These stories were written in the early 1950s, but I don't remember seeing that way of writing the word anywhere else in books of that period.
Despite the pitfalls, I think this will be an enjoyable book for someone to proof.
Misha 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.
