Jeroen Hellingman <jeroen@bohol.ph> writes:
I'm one of those people guilty of big backlogs, with 13 books in various stages of completion in Post Processing after going through DP.
Thanks for your commitment!
I always do SGML, XML, and HTML, have heavily illustrated works with lots of tables, and these take a lot of work, no matter what the proofreaders do. A few times I've just left out the most horrendous tables, to type them personally, or even drop them from the work altogether.
Things like these take many resources ;-( Nevertheless, droping contents alltogetther is not appropriate - better include them asis, even if they would look very wrong. Thus the reader can see this material and lend a helping hand...
Then, adding ASCII versions also adds to the delay, as I can generate HTML from the SGML automatically, but ASCII simply is too hard to automate, which means redoing the tables again.
Heresy alert: As long as the book is readable with lynx, w3m, or another text browser, I wouldn't spend time on ASCII versions. Better consider to create PDFs from the SGML/XML source files. BTW, pdftotext from the xpdf suite is worth a try!
An average novel can be PP-ed in a few hours, but those scientific works take many hours. My longest running project (not through DP) is Alberuni's India, with long citations in Greek, Persian, Sanskrit, etc., often in the original scripts (five different scripts in this book). Spread out over five years, hundreds of hours have gone into it, and it is not yet done.
Yes, those books are not suitable for DP. Also other books could be proofread better and/or faster if one would loudly read the original text (plus punctions and stuff like that) and a partner proofreader would listen to the reader while checking the OCR results. (Of course, using a "Diktiergerät" (dictating machine and an appropriate player with pedals for control) you can go this way without a partner. -- | ,__o | _-\_<, http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/ | (*)/'(*)