Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
That can all-too-easily change the meaning of sentences, paragraphs, character motivations, entire storylines. Talk to some of the people in this forum, and they can tell you about a badly-done OCR job on one book or another that has done exactly that.
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I've been proofing a classic text recently. I was surprised to discover how many differences there are between editions. One version would have something like:
"I agreed to the idea - but not willingly."
Another might have:
"I agreed to the idea; but not willingly."
Who knows which was 'right' (even a first edition might have a misprint)?
For anti-pirating purposes, the author could have selected '-' as a signature candidate with ';' as an alternate to be used at random (doesn't significantly alter the sense as far as I can see.)
This would just be one of the hundred or so signature indicators throughout the text.