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Originally Posted by morriss003
I will answer this as a guilty author. I just finished and uploaded "Sam's Winnings" to smashwords.com. Once the book had been formatted, I started reading the book to see if everything was ok. Wince, wince, and wince again. All I can say in my defense, is that I read the book, while looking for mistakes, several times. Yet, once it was uploaded, I found several more. Reupload. I have noticed that once a book is in a different font, or size, I find many of the mistakes that I miss on the first several readings. This has to be a vision thing. The brain is wired this way. I suppose that is why having an editor is nice. Someone with a different vision thing.
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As Harry states, it's really best to have someone else proof-read - but of course that is not always possible.
As you noticed, changing format helps a lot, espcially such a dramatic format change as printing out. Leaving it for a while, months if possible, also helps to trick your brain into believing it's "new". As the writer of the text, your brain know it too well.
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Originally Posted by Sparrow
I'd welcome any tips on proofreading from the experts here.
I'm correcting a text version of a PDF scan at the moment, so loads of errors to spot.
Setting the font to Courier New is helping, because I find individual letters are easier to discern with a monospace font.
Each time I spot a typo I do a global 'search and replace' to correct all occurrences (checking each one before amending).
Afterwards I'll do searches for spaces where they shouldn't be, a spell check run, search for common mistakes (e.g. 'hut' instead of 'but') etc.
But that's pretty basic stuff - anyone know any more sophisticated tips?
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I'll be listening in - I could use some tips, too. Using a mono-space font sounds like a good idea. I don't scan a lot, as proofreading is so time consuming (and my OCR software is a free version that can't 'learn' - and that excludes Danish books, too, as it simply can't deal with æ, ø and å).
On Mac I can do a search and replace of line breaks, so I can remove them - but I haven't been able to find a metod that works in Windows. I remember an article on Lifehacker I read years ago, about reformatting Project Gutenberg books, but I couldn't get any of the suggested methods to work.
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Originally Posted by HarryT
Really the only way to "properly" proof-read is to have the eBook and the original document side by side, and read them "in parallel", looking for discrepencies. It's very, very time-consuming, but if you want to do a first-rate job it's the only way.
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The times I've done it, I had the scan of the page displayed in a picture viewer side by side with the text editing application. This works best if you have a large monitor or two monitors, of course, but I don't think it would be possible to properly proof-read a scanned text without consulting the original. Sometimes the OCR software mangles things so much it's uncomprehensible, or you just can't guess the right word.