hallelujah! some people are finally talking some sense into rfrank's head. one person suggested some reg-ex tests be shown to proofers. all by itself, this is an improvement, but not that big, because these tests should be done _before_ the text goes to proofers. however, what it did was it jolted roger out of his thinking that such tests are done in _postprocessing_, a huge ideological shift. roger admitted as much. thank you lord! another person pointed out that a global search-and-replace would be a real asset. d'uh, who's been saying that for _years_? one person said:
I've noticed "Pem" scanned as "Pern" a few times.
roger responded with:
Done. Fifty-seven replacements.
yes! see how easy this can be? so roger said, "tell me what kind of global changes you'd make". so one person came back and said, "how about things like these:"
change did n't to didn't change could n't to couldn't
kinda hard to believe that those fixes weren't already being made in preprocessing, isn't it? but hey, let's be glad for the progress... sure enough, roger got the hint, and changed all of the floating contractions, and then promised he'd do that in _preprocessing_ next time. hallelujah! now is the time to give roger that list of 30 tests that i highlighted back in that month-long series i did... now the _next_ thing would be for someone to _volunteer_ to do all of this preprocessing for roger, using the tool dkretz coded... hallelujah! -bowerbird