don said:
The path away from the quagmire needs to reintroduce simplicity, and especially single simple jobs that iteratively improve a piece of text, with immediate gratification. There probably need to be several simultaneous small-to-medium-size units of work that offer closure and positive reinforcement
you said all that before.
for the benefit of people who don't have toolchains they know intimately and have been refining for years; and other people who can be persuaded to adopt and learn them.
ok, dude, fine. but i'm guessing that, once you have your little system that everyone buys, your start-up page will look like this: ===============================
"book-dig" -- for book digitization...
thanks for helping to digitize books!
"book-dig" is a system to _finalize_ a paper-book that's being digitized.
a person who's done the bulk of the preliminary prep and o.c.r. clean-up can then use "book-dig" to let other volunteers help polish off the book...
(book-dig also lets you do finalization by yourself if you prefer to do that, or don't want to have to "recruit" people.)
this "finalization" process helps to turn corrected o.c.r. into a refined e-book...
in some circles, this has been known to be called "post-processing", as if it were just an "afterthought", but professionals know these tasks _are_ "the processing".
but that doesn't mean it must be difficult.
by breaking it into a series of small tasks, it actually becomes simple (and fun) to do!
***
step through these tasks to polish a book.
(you probably should do the tasks in order, since the later ones depend on the earlier, at least until you have enough experience to know if/when it's ok to go out of order.)
* task #01. check paragraphing. * task #02. check doublequotes.
* task #03. check any flags left. * task #04. check formatting. * task #05. check illustrations. * task #06. check the styling. * task #07. check hyphenates. * task #08. check singlequotes. * task #09. check look and feel. * task #10. check dictionaries.
* task #11. search function. * task #12. fix flagged items. * task #13. there is no 13th task.
* task #14. final certification. * task #15. prelim read-through. * task #16. final read-through. * task #17. mount the book. * task #18. check the mount. * task #19. open up champagne. * task #20. start the next book.
=============================== so, you know, if you need to "borrow" this design, go ahead. i figure you'll get around to it in 8 years. -bowerbird