Quote:
Originally Posted by Tex2002ans
No problem, the goal is to make everyone better at making higher quality books more quickly, and giving everyone the skills for more thorough error checking.  |
Tex, Thanks for all the info. I looked at all of the links and will go over them later to gather more of what they are saying.
A couple of questions though. I'm in the final stages of proofreading a novel. I was about one third through it. Then, having fallen totally in love with your b\text\b Regex search tool I started experimenting with it and looking for various things, trying to really get a feel for how it might help me. One of the things I did was put in various punctuation marks, including a straight quotation mark ("), which I often inadvertently put in when editing. Well, I finished up last night and when I came to the mss. in the morning I saw one straight quotation mark right in the very beginning of the book. (As I recall in the code it was not bracketed. It was just plopped down next to the end bracket for Chapter One.)
In that I was doing a final proofread this threw me. I of course wondered if the regex searching had added any other little things. I know you warned about regex deleting things, but can it add things as well? (I really can't think of any other possible way that quotation mark could have got there. And I have started proofreading again from the beginning and I'd say I'm about one-sixth through now and I have not seen any additional things that shouldn't be there.)
And a follow-up question: Perhaps (if indeed Regex can add things) it would be wise to only use Regex in the beginning phases of cleaning a document up?
And I'm also a little concerned about how and what it might delete. (Yes, it seems great but scary! And remember I'm just doing my own books--and really they're pretty clean to begin with. Maybe I should leave Regex to pros like you?)
Thanks!