andrew said:
>   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.

you just made up all of those numbers.

take an easy text, the kind that can be "prepared and
submitted in one day" after having gone through d.p.,
but which -- according to you -- "could take perhaps
three to six weeks" were it to be done by a solo person.

your figures are just ridiculous...

it takes an hour, perhaps two or three, to spellcheck
a typical easy book and get it formatted into shape...

for a more difficult book, the spellchecking time is
dwarfed by the formatting task, which is not really
significantly lessened by having gone through d.p.

and no text is so difficult that it "could never have been
attempted by an individual", so that's just balderdash...
there might not be any individuals who _are_ motivated
to take on big projects, but given the rate at which these
big projects get finished at d.p., the gap isn't all that big.


>   One other very significant aspect is that DP
>   has been set up to encourage a sense of community.

i'm not sure charlz "set up" d.p. for that specific purpose.
it's true that a sense of community _has_ developed there.
but that can happen just about anywhere.  it's also the case
that the d.p. community indulges itself often in groupthink,
which is one down side of "community".  i'm not arguing that
the down side offsets the good, because i don't think it does,
but if we are going to mention one side, let's mention both...


>   And you have ready access to people with
>   specialized knowledge about many languages,
>   musical notation, obscure unicode characters,
>   obselete typesetting conventions, etc.

that's true.  but it's also the case that that "ready access"
_could_ have developed right here, on this listserve, and
been available to everyone, including the "solo" producers.
so having it exist only within the d.p. silo is a bit regrettable.


>   At no point in the history of DP was

well, carlo has already pointed out that andrew's memory is
a bit foggy on this particular point.  and that happens with
individuals as we grow older, so there's no shame in that...

but there's a tendency among d.p. people to rewrite history,
almost always in a way that's favorable to their interpretation,
so it's always refreshing when that tendency gets a fact-check.

-bowerbird