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i love my tools! because the proof is in the pudding!
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Mar '10

18 Mar '10

guilty as charged, keith! i _do_ love my tools! all of them! most especially the ones that i coded myself, since i put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into each one! but even the ones that other people made, i love those too! because they make my life easier for me! and i love "easier"! and it's not that stupid kind of blind love, either. no sir. because -- don't forget it! -- the proof is in the pudding! i can tell you exactly why i love each of my tools, and those reasons are good, solid reasons with sound, logical backing. i analyze my needs, and my tools, extremely closely so that i _know_ -- with _certainty_ -- just exactly what i need and why i need it, and then i make sure that my tools deliver it, whether they were programmed by someone else (which i strongly prefer, because i _did_ mention that i love "easier") or programmed by me (due to the blood, sweat, and tears). i'm happy to share my analyses of my needs, and my tools, too, because that makes all of us smarter about all of that, and i'm happy when other people share _their_ analyses too. but yes yes yes yes yes yes yes, i _do_ love my tools! i do! and it's easy as pie to know why! the proof is in the pudding! -bowerbird

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@!@!@!@!@!@!@! Re: [SPAM] re: New Tool "pgdiff"
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Mar '10

18 Mar '10

why are these posts coming back with "spam" in the header? -bowerbird

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[SPAM] re: New Tool "pgdiff"
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Mar '10

18 Mar '10

ok, jim, here's some sample files for your tool... i'm using the book "sitka" that rfrank used on his test-site. here's the original text uploaded by rfrank for his proofers: > http://z-m-l.com/go/jimad/sitka0-ocr.txt and here's the text after the proofers were done with it: > http://z-m-l.com/go/jimad/sitka1-pp.txt if you can run that through your tool and share its output, that would be great. or i'll do it, when i next encounter a windows box. :+) -bowerbird

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(no subject)
by Dan Weber 18 Mar '10

18 Mar '10

To whom it may concern: www.popsci.com This site has 137 years of Popular Science magazine page scans online for free. danweber(a)mindspring.com

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[SPAM] re: New Tool "pgdiff"
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Mar '10

18 Mar '10

jim said: > And the correct answer is neither A nor B but rather C == _must_ well, one could easily program the tool to offer an italicized version of an all-upper choice if you know you'll be processing p.g. e-texts. indeed, a button that will italicize both choices is easy enough to code. likewise with _any_ particular editing function that might be required... for instance, i've programmed a routine that checks for a spacey-quote; if it finds a spacey-quote in one of the choices, and the two choices are otherwise identical, it auto-selects the option without the spacey-quote. *** in reviewing the pgdiff output from the sitka files, i wanted to see if you would do much preprocessing on the files. it appears to me you did not. in general, i'd _highly_ recommend preprocessing before a comparison. the number of diffs can be significantly lowered by good preprocessing, and preprocessing is typically a far more efficient way to make changes. it also helps to know about the nature of the files that you're comparing. for instance, one of the sitka files was a post-proofing file, meaning that it was littered with artifacts of the d.p. workflow... these include "notes" the proofers leave for the post-processor. it's far better to handle these "notes" in an editor during preprocessing before you start the comparison. another artifact of the d.p. workflow is asterisks on end-line (and end-page) hyphenates. i typically just delete these asterisks, as i have no use for them. some of these were present in the o.c.r. file too, so i removed them as well... after having deleted all the asterisks associated with "notes" and hyphenates, the only asterisks left in the file were those that indicated _footnotes_ in the o.c.r. file, so i did a monitored global change of them to footnote indicators. that way, these footnote indicators wouldn't present a "spurious" difference... (i could've done a global change to the characters that indicated the second and third footnotes on a page, but i didn't bother, as there weren't too many.) it also helps to know that rfrank marks "questionable" situations with an "@", so you can search for those and deal with those before doing a comparison. oh, and one other _big_ thing. the o.c.r. file had the _pagenumbers_ in it. they were enclosed in brackets, at the bottom of most pages, which is why rfrank's preprocessing program probably didn't find them to delete them... now, those pagenumbers were deleted by the proofers -- except in the 2 cases where the proofers failed to make the deletion -- so they were _not_ present in the second file. so, to avoid the spurious diffs, you could have eliminated them from the o.c.r. file easily, with a series of reg-ex changes. on the other hand, since i _like_ pagenumbers, and want to _keep_ them, i had my tool _inject_ them from the o.c.r. file back into the proofed file... either way, it's best to eliminate as many of these "spurious" diffs as you can. and i note here, jim, that you did eliminate one case of such "spurious" diffs when you reformatted the page-scan references so they would be identical. so i encourage you to take that general idea and run with it... i _will_ talk further about the diffs that were generated anyway. but i wanted to stress the importance of doing preprocessing... *** jim, i looked at hkdiff.txt briefly. i don't know what kind of sense to make of this diff at the end: > {|or|don't|you?-that's|the|idea.|Don't|you|reckon|12} i removed the whitespace so it'd fit on one line. -bowerbird

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[SPAM] re: Re: New Tool "pgdiff"
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Mar '10

18 Mar '10

jim said: > If you know of a portable GUI library system > that you think is really really good let me know i use realbasic. if i didn't think it was really good, i wouldn't use it. it compiles to windows, mac (even back to classic), and linux too... -bowerbird

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Re: New Tool "pgdiff"
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Mar '10

18 Mar '10

jim said: > Post your tools, including source code, and then let’s talk about it. maybe you're too new here to know this, but i don't post my source code. even if i did, it wouldn't do you any good, unless you can use realbasic... likewise, your code doesn't do me any good, because i don't deal with whatever language you've posted it in, so you have done me no favors, and thus i don't feel any need to "reciprocate" for your posted code... but what _might_ do you some good is for me to talk in pseudo-code, if you're interested in hearing that, which i am more than happy to do. but none of this is difficult. especially from a line-based perspective. you read one file into one array, and the second file into a second array, and then compare the two arrays, item-by-item. it ain't rocket-science. the main difficulty in any comparison routine is the re-sync process; but if you work in a line-based way, your lines don't get out-of-sync. (in the rare cases where they do, you can make a manual adjustment.) so with this, the interface is more important than the underlying code. but i'm even willing to post compiled versions of a comparison tool, so that you can get a very good idea about the interface i am using, provided you can get a handful of people -- i.e., 5 people -- to say publicly, right on this listserve, that they would like to see my tool... but i haven't gotten the impression that anyone here can code a g.u.i. for an offline app. i'd love to be wrong about that, so please please do correct me, anyone listening out there, if you can indeed do that... -bowerbird p.s. if you can't get 5 people to say "please", then you should read the design description that keith wrote up last night, as it's decent.

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Popular Science back issues
by Dan Weber 18 Mar '10

18 Mar '10

Sorry. The address is http://www.popsci.com/announcements/article/2010-03/new-browse-137-years-pop sci-archive-free I had to grab the jpg files from my temp internet files folder (Win Vista) Hopefully someone else will know a better way to get them They say they are partnered with Google danweber(a)mindspring.com

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Re: New Tool "pgdiff"
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Mar '10

18 Mar '10

keith said: > BB you wanted some clarification so I will try. um, ok, i guess. > First, I do not have the time to look closely at either > tool nor overs, as it would take to long for me to > properly analyze them, and due the analysis merit. um, ok, i guess. :+) > So I will proppose a possible design. > Take the good, leave the bad. um, ok, i guess. ;+) > In my opinion would be a tool with four windows/frames: > 1) the scan > 2) version 1 > 3) version 2 > 4) the proofed version ... > The scan (1) would be optimally syncrhonised > with the passage being checked. ... > Now, we have three cases to consider: > a) version 1 is correct > b) version 2 is correct > c) neither 1 or 2 is correct > d) the case where 1 and 2 are correct is > actually not possible in our context > unless version 1 and 2 are comming from different edition. > Still we can handle this in the same manner as c. ... > Hope this helps. If not hit delete. ok. now i'm curious... :+) keith, how do you think i pull off all the comparisons i do? how do you think i can sling around lists of diffs like i do? > http://z-m-l.com/go/gardn/gardn-hybrid6.html how do you think i can mount entire books with diffs? > http://z-m-l.com/go/gardn/gardn-hybrid7.html how do you think i resolve the diffs in all the books i do? i can tell you how i do it! i do it with tools i've programmed that do all the things that you talk about, and more. that's how i do it, keith. so you don't have to do hypothetical writeups, keith, especially if you're short on time, because i have a big batch of post-hypothetical reality sitting in my toolbox. it's not that your writeup doesn't "help". it's that we are past that point in time... and we have been, for a while. -bowerbird

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a rose smells just as sweet
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 Mar '10

17 Mar '10

rfrank has informed people that he doesn't consider his site to be "competition" to the d.p. site... so from now on i'll characterize it instead as "an alternative" to d.p. it's all good. and a rose smells just as sweet... -bowerbird

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