miranda said:

The scans are done and if you like I will mail you a copy.

that would be great, miranda! i'd love to help you out! and you don't even have to mail them! just put them online, in one zip file, and let me know where they are. i'll go get 'em. oh yeah, i only have the _english_ module for abbyy finereader, and that won't work well with accented text, so you'll have to do the o.c.r. on the images with the correct language modules, ok? so put the o.c.r. files in a zip file too, so i can grab those. and i should say that my tool facilitates the proofing process, but can't help much if you're proofing a language you don't know, and i only know english. so you might not get the best results from me. so far, i'm just concentrating on doing _english_ books. once i get those down, then i can do work on helping people who speak other languages extend the tool for their purposes as well. oh yeah, one more thing. please include spell-check dictionaries for the languages that are contained in the text, because i only have an english one. marcello can probably help you find those...

I'd like to have the proofed book back before the weekend, if that's not too much trouble.

my schedule is full for the next week or more. i can't even get to the second half of "my antonia" until friday at the earliest, and probably next week. so it'll be a couple weeks before i can get to yours. and this sounds like it's not really "an average book", so it might take me two or three evenings, not just one. but i'd still love to take on your project sometime! so put those scans somewhere where i can grab 'em, and i'll get to them at my very first opportunity, ok? oh yeah, i do hope they are 600-dpi scans, like jon's. those were really fine. they gave very clean o.c.r., and they're very pleasant to look at, as well. nice. and let me know if you decide to start doing the project, because there's no reason for us to duplicate our efforts. it won't hurt my feelings if you get impatient waiting! but since there's lots of books over at d.p. for you to do, if you want to just hold off on this one and let me take it, feel free! -bowerbird