On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 13:04:18 EST, Bowerbird@aol.com <Bowerbird@aol.com> wrote:
carlo said:
How do you manage words that are written in the same way, except the accent? This is quite common in french and italian.
i wouldn't strip away high-bit characters on a french or ltalian book; they are an essential part of those languages. i've said that repeatedly.
Then why take the time to remove the high-bit characters in an English book? There's lots of books that have important French quotations or use accents to denote unpredictable stress; why strip them from the books that you can, just because? It's not hard at all to deal with the handful of accents the average English book has.
if you want me to estimate some hard numbers, i'd say 75% of the e-texts in the library now could be done to our standard in one evening.
Not by someone new to the job. To do a book in an evening requires that you be experianced with the job and the tools. And I get real tired of you using the average book in PG as a metric. The average book in PG was chosen because it was relatively easy to do. Out of the three floors of books in the library I'm sitting (excluding the governmental depository), the basement is full of science, math or technology books, and will require complex graphical work or mathematical work. Of the remaining 66% (probably more like 55% or 60%, since the third floor is small), many of them are art or music books or dictionaries and grammars, or archiac languages that OCR doesn't handle well, or archiac fonts that OCR doesn't handle well.
here's where the value of distributed proofreaders will most come into play in the future, in my opinion, being able to "fix up" the work of independent proofers.
It's funny that if the value of DP is so limited, that the percentage of texts that have come in from DP is so high. Why don't we have more people doing books by hand alone?
that's what i intend to give them. all i ask of you is that you stop telling people that this job is difficult. it's not.
When you upload books to PG, what name do you put on them? For all your words, I can't recall ever seeing a book credited to you. I have no samples of what you've worked on alone and what your quality standards are to judge by.