On Mon, 15 Feb 2010, don kretz wrote:
When DP started, here was the basic process as far as the participants were concerned.
1.) A person takes a page of text and a picture of the text, plus a mediocre online text editor and some guidelines for follow, and tries to get the text to match the picture.
2.) A second person takes their work and the same picture and guidelines, and tries to make it better.
3.) The system strings the text files together and hands them off to PG to publish.
Are you sure you have phrased that in the way you wanted? At no point in the history of DP was the output of the rounds "strung together and handed directly off to PG". I cannot recall if the name of "post-processor" has always been used--but there has always been someone in that role. Anyone who has worked on PP would know that the output on the rounds at DP is _not_ ready to be posted as a finished text without a good deal more work. But this is ok--this is as intended. The purpose of DP (as I understand it) has always been to distribute much of the work, and make things easier for the person preparing the text for submission to PG. To put this in context, let's compare with pre-DP times, when everything was done on an individual basis. An easy text that has come through DP can be prepared and submitted in one day; a more difficult one can take a week or two; a really hard one might take months working on it on and off. Now take those same texts without the DP preparation, where an individual starts working himself from the ocr output. The easy text could take perhaps three to six weeks; the more difficult one five to eight months or longer; and the hardest texts that have been done through DP could never have been attempted by an individual. One other very significant aspect is that DP has been set up to encourage a sense of community. And you have ready access to people with specialized knowledge about many languages, musical notation, obscure unicode characters, obselete typesetting conventions, etc. In the time before DP it was quite common for somone to put much effort into working on a text, and the burn out and abandon the project. Having DP gives many people a chance to do their bit, and have a much more manageable learning curve. --Andrew