al said:

In short, DP's current processes produce error-free texts; its old processes, from what I've seen of the results, didn't.

oh my, this is just too rich. a full-on admission that an "old" d.p. e-text was full of bugs. too rich. because d.p. cheerleaders -- like karen "zora" lofstrom -- have _always_ maintained that d.p. output was super-clean; it's the stuff from the _individual_ producers that is shoddy, _not_ the material from d.p. you can see this same attitude expressed _to_this_very_day_ over on the d.p. forum boards. of course, it was _easy_ to prove them wrong in the old days; all you had to do was make a laundry-list of errors in a text. (i provided such a list of errors to this very listserve for a book that was postprocessed by zora herself -- #13603 -- and the _hundreds_ of errors i located have _still_ not been repaired, even though the book was posted way back in october of 2004. so much for zora's stance of superiority. her work is flawed.) anyway, after enough laundry-lists of errors had been made, d.p. people finally had to admit their quality-control was faulty. sadly, they didn't know how to fix their system, so they just piled on more rounds, and built a flawed "certification system" to promote some proofers to "final-round" status, which only had the effect of stagnating their workflow with huge queues, as a boatload of books (thousands!) plugged up the system... and they've clung to this hierarchical model in the face of clear evidence (from their own experiments!) that _proved_ that the p3 proofers aren't any better than the p1 proofers... and even though it's perfectly clear that you can get good pages without subjecting every page in every book to 3 proofing rounds and 2 formatting rounds, following by postprocessing, and then maybe smoothreading, and then maybe postprocessing verification, nonetheless that's what their workflow system calls for them to do. so they experiment with ways to circumvent that workflow system, instead of just fixing it. it is a comedy of errors, in slow-motion... but hey, as long as you get "error-free texts", then who cares if you're wasting tons of time and energy donated by the volunteers? -bowerbird