ok, so let's talk about my collaborative proofreading site... yeah, that's a real knee-slapper, isn't it? :+) ok, i'll talk, and y'all can just sit and listen. or go watch t.v. *** to see what i'm talking about, you can visit this u.r.l.:
when you go there, you're proofing the "sitka" book... unlike other proofing systems, pages are not "assigned" to you. you can go and proof any page you wanna proof. even go back the next day and proof it again, if you like. you'll see a row of buttons at the top-left of the screen, which includes one that says "go", and "prev", and "next"... navigating the pages... "prev" and "next" are what you'd expect. they take you to the previous page or the next page in the book, obviously. at the end of that row of buttons, you'll see an edit-field that has a number in it. (or perhaps a letter and numbers.) that number is the pagenumber. (and, ergo, the filename.) if you want to jump to a specific page, put its number in the edit-field, and then click the "go" button. boom, you're there. the ability to navigate the book at will, and to proof any page you like, can be extremely powerful once you learn to use it. certifying a page as clean... there's also an "ok" button. that's what you will click when you've proofed a page and found nothing at all to change. by clicking "ok", you indicate you certify the page is clean. searching the book for a string... next to "ok" is another edit-field and a "find" button next to it. this field lets you enter a search-term, and then when you click "find", a screen appears that lists pages with that search-term... the line containing the word is shown, with a link to its page. if you want to visit any of these pages, you can open them in a separate tab/window. and it's fine to open a bunch at one time. for instance, say you want to check the sitka chapter-headers. enter the term "chapter" in the edit-field, and then click "find", and you will get a list that includes the table of contents page as well as each of the nine pages where each chapter starts... (red lines are a case-insensitive hit; black are case-sensitive.) there are many other ways you can use the search functionality, but we'll save the discussion about all of those for a later time... to return from the search-results page back to a proofing page, just use the "back" button in your browser. you'll have to clear the search-term out of the edit-field, or it'll do the search again. (i should make it so it only does the search when you click the "find" button, but that's not the way it works now, sorry folks.) feel the power with the "command" field... the edit-field where you enter your search-term also serves as a "command" field. i'll eventually have a number of commands that you can issue, but for now there's just a couple of them... showmap... the first command is "showmap". enter that, and click "find". the program will show the "map" of files comprising the book. each one is a clickable link, so -- as before -- you can open any pages you like in separate tabs and proof them just fine... ("listcat", short for "list catalog", is a synonym that works too.) concat... another command is "concat". enter that, and click "find", and the program will concatenate all the text files into one, and put them on a web-page for you. this will allow you to look at the entire book, save it to your machine, and so on... you can also use the browser's "find" command, so "concat" is useful when you need more context to a "find" operation than the single line output from the native find command... showcustom... a third command is "showcustom". this command spits out the "custom dictionary" that has been created for the book. *** that's enough for now. give you a little toy to play with over the weekend, if you like. we'll discuss more stuff next week. anyway, thanks for the little chat. so, how was the t.v. show? -bowerbird