Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexBell
I recently had a contributor send me a list of typos in two of the ebooks I have done for the MobileRead library recently. Though I was very grateful to be told of the typos (and to be given the corrections) I was horrified at how many typos I had missed.
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What sort of typos are we talking about?
Can you point us to the Before/After EPUB? Or a list of the typos?
Were these:
- OCR Errors
- "modem" -> "modern"
- "l913" -> "1913"
- Hard/Soft Hyphen Errors
- Punctuation Errors
- ',' instead of '.'
- "1918-1920" -> "1918–1920"
- Accidental accents + quotation marks
- (Maybe dust/mark was in the PDF scan).
- Missing Spaces
- Mistakes in the actual book
- [...]
I tend to spot certain "classes" of errors in given books, and then apply certain methods (regex to try to catch the pattern, etc. etc.). Over the years, I guess you just learn what your "weakness" might be, and then you can be sure to pay special attention to that class of errors in the future.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexBell
Can anyone give me references or ideas on how to improve my proofreading? I've searched the MobileRead site, but haven't found much.
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Over the past few years, I have added a few extra "final" passes in my proofreading stages.
- Sigil + Calibre Spellcheck Lists
- I use this to catch a huge range of typos. Being able to visualize/see the words in a different light sometimes helps you catch completely mistakes you missed doing normal passes.
- There are 10 "modern" and 1 "modem".
- Slight differences in Calibre/Sigil helps you see different errors
- For example, Calibre counts numbers as "words" and Sigil doesn't. Calibre's helps you easily spot the "l913" OCR error above.
- I still think this is one of the best ways to catch Hyphenation errors.
- Toxaris's Dialogue Check (part of his EPUB Tools)
- This is absolutely the best/only way I check proper quotation marks now.
- LibreOffice/Word Spell Check
- Sometimes just running the book through a different set of dictionaries helps.
- I also like to do this phase because as others mentioned, it also helps when you visualize the text in a different font/page size/view.
- LibreOffice/Word Grammar Check
- I must admit this is very helpful. Way back when these books were first made, they may not have had access to a tool like this, and it is VERY easy for a basic typo to slip through.
- Example: Last week I caught this typo:
"First of all, acceptance of a general MOE implied that while, on the one hand, all other commodities retained their usefulness “just being themselves,” so to speak, the monetary commodity, on the other hand, not only retained it original usefulness but was now also being demanded for its monetary use as a medium of exchange."
This is the type of typo I would have never been able to catch by just glancing/skimming through the book.