re: [gutvol-d] a wiki-like mechanism for continuous proofreading and error-reporting
jon said:
But what resolution?
their website tells you. in a $10,000 machine, it better be good.
There's a web site somewhere giving a review of the model you describe, but don't have the URL handy.
we don't need a review on a website, as there's plenty of d.p. people here who'll vouch it's an amazing machine.
Yes, that is true. There is a lot of interest in DP to redo a lot of the pre-DP classics in the PG corpus, from what I understand, so it may get done anyway even if PG does not encourage it.
you didn't read what i wrote. it is _distributed_proofreaders_ that -- as a whole -- is more interested in doing new books than re-doing old ones. if they wanted to do it before now, they would have. but they haven't... (a few of 'em have redone old books. including some html versions that jim recently asked them to fix up. but as a course of action, not much.) michael doesn't tell d.p. what to do. he doesn't tell _anyone_ what to do. even if you _ask_ him for guidance, he's usually too stubborn to give it. -bowerbird
At the risk of coming into the middle: My experience is that the time consuming part of going from book to E-book is the proofreading. The scanning, cropping, and OCR are probably less than about a quarter of the time. - I use a Canon S230 3 megapixel camera in a copy stand to get about 300 dpi scans. I can do 4-6 pages a minute, without destroying the book. I have been quite happy with using a camera as scanner, but 600 dpi would halve the processing speed. I tried 2 pictures per page, but I did not find any improvement in the OCR quality. - I use Abby FineReader 5.0, which was not that expensive, and it usually finds the right text, flipping pages and cropping automatically. A pass over the pages using FineReader to find basic OCR issues takes about 15 seconds a page. So up to this point, a 250 page book could be done in 2-3 hours of concentrated work. I would guess I have 2-4 errors per page at this point. - then comes a first pass proofreading, also fixing headers and footers. this is often 30 seconds per page. - then a full second pass of proofreading, again about 30 seconds a page. I probably find an error a page in this pass. Then I ship it. I could believe it could be done in a day's elapsed time, but I don't think I can focus that hard all in a single day. The real problem is my day job is using up most of my available concentration, so I don't feel up to spending too much time proofing. my 2 cents... Kent Fielden
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Bowerbird＠aol.com -
Kent Fielden