On Mon, 15 Feb 2010, Carlo Traverso wrote:
"Andrew" == Andrew Sly <sly@victoria.tc.ca> writes:
Andrew> At no point in the history of DP was the output of the Andrew> rounds "strung together and handed directly off to PG". I Andrew> cannot recall if the name of "post-processor" has always Andrew> been used--but there has always been someone in that role.
When I started at DP, in 2002, the work needed to pass from the R2 output to posting to PG was officially estimated in 30 minutes, without any specialized tool. I think that "strung together and handed directly off to PG" is a correct metaphor for 30 minutes of work. Enough to remove the separators, reflow the line ends, and that was all. No formatting (italics converted to uppercase for ship names), accents removed, no spell-checking, no gutcheck. This was a task of the project manager, and handing the task to somebody else was exceptional.
Thanks Carlo. Perhaps my memory has become hazy in the intervening years. :) But still I questions your list. Why accents removed? It was fairly routine to post latin-1 texts at that time. (I can find an "8-bit" text as #1595, with a release date if Jan, 1999.) The earliest reference to gutcheck that I can find in my old emails is on Tue, 23 Jul 2002, but I don't think it was in common use yet. It was actually something that Jim T. had written as an evaluation tool for submitted texts.
Of course, even then, it took to me much longer to complete a book, since I used to re-read the book to catch a bunch of remaining errors.
I did the same with the project I ran through DP at that time as well. Perhaps that's why I assumed it was the norm. --Andrew