On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 5:43 PM, Al Haines <ajhaines@shaw.ca> wrote:
As for "upgrading the toolset", none of the WWers has the programming skills to upgrade software like Gutcheck/Jeebies/Gutspell to properly handle UTF8 files, check curly quotes, etc, etc.
Nobody needs text files any longer. Drop the requirement and drop the software needed to check the text files. Ask submitters to send well-formed XHTML, which can be created with many flavors of software. Format as epub and mobi. That's really all that is needed these days. ebooks@adelaide is doing it right. The original point of the text files was that they were supposed to be a fallback for people who only had old, slow, desktop computers. Perhaps running CP/M :) No longer the case. Poor Third-World users of PG files want epubs they can read on their phones. They cannot afford desktops, or laptops, but they can afford cheap refurbished phones. Distributed Proofreaders could drop the arcane rules of the formatting stage (required to format text files to PG requirements). They could stop requiring PPers to install outdated software that may be a huge hassle to install on modern operating systems. I could take P3 output, check it with Perfectit, run it through NoteTab Pro for the XHTML, drop it into an epub structure in Oxygen, and get a book out in a few days. Less time if I had a partner to do the HTML. Perhaps if we could just fork the workflow and see how a new, modern process would work. -- Karen Lofstrom