DP: Standard Proofreading Interface Help

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Standard Proofreading Interface Help

Introduction

To understand the interface, you need to understand the following Q & A.

Q: Where do my pages go?

A: There are four possible destinations in the system for the pages that you proofread. They are:

"DONE": All final changes are saved, and proofreading is completed. These pages are ready to go to the next round. There are links to the five most recent pages in this category on the Project Comments page, under the heading "DONE". These pages can be re-opened for corrections if necessary by clicking on the individual links. Do not mark a page "DONE" unless you have really finished correcting it, or else this partially-proofread page may move to the next round when the rest of the project does!

"IN PROGRESS": Changes made so far are saved, but proofreading is not yet completed. These pages are not yet ready to go the next round. There are links to the five most recent pages in this category on the Project Comments page, under the heading "IN PROGRESS". These pages are waiting for you to complete them; you can do so by clicking on the individual links to re-open them and finish the proofreading. If you do not complete them, eventually the system will reclaim them for someone else to proofread.

"RETURN TO ROUND" All changes are abandoned, original version of page made available for someone else to proofread. This is for pages that, once you saw them, you decided you didn't want to or couldn't proofread, but that someone else might be able to. Whoever next clicks on the "Start Proofreading" link for this project will get the page to proofread.

"BAD" All changes are abandoned, page cannot be proofread due to damage or flaws and is made unavailable until it can be repaired by the Project Manager.

When you open a page for proofreading, it is automatically "IN PROGRESS"

Now you will understand the following explanations of what the buttons do.

"I haven't finished proofreading this page, but I want to save my work on it so far."

Save changes to the current page. The page is now IN PROGRESS. This button is intended to temporarily save your work so far on a page you plan to finish later, perhaps because it is too long or you are interrupted. You will be repositioned to the start of the page.

"I have finished proofreading this page, it is as correct as I can make it, so I want to save it as DONE, and start proofreading the next available page."

Save all changes, and finish proofreading the current page. The page is now DONE. The next available page within the project, if any, will be opened for proofreading.

"I have finished proofreading this page, it is as correct as I can make it, so I want to save it as DONE, and stop proofreading for now."

Save all changes, and finish proofreading the current page. The page is now DONE. Stop proofreading. The proofreading browser window will close.

"I haven't finished proofreading this page, but I want to stop proofreading for now. I will finish proofreading this page later."

Closes the proofreading interface without saving the current page. The page will be IN PROGRESS. To save your most recent changes before quitting, use the "Save as 'In Progress'" button first. Note that "Save as 'In Progress'" followed by 'Stop Proofreading' (page is left IN PROGRESS) is NOT equivalent to "Save as 'Done'" (page is left DONE).

/

"I'd rather the image was to the left of / above the text."

Toggles your interface layout between vertical mode (scanned image of page appears to the LEFT of the OCR text you are correcting) and horizontal mode (scanned image of page appears ABOVE the OCR text you are correcting). On the way, it performs a 'SAVE'. The page is IN PROGRESS.

"This page is more than I can (or want to) proofread at the moment, but someone else may have better luck."

Abandons any changes you have made to the current page, and returns the original version to the top of the pile of available pages for this project, waiting for the next proofreader who requests a new page to proofread from this project, to whom it will go for proofreading. (See RETURN TO ROUND.)

If a page seems too long or complex for you, you can return it to round for someone else to do. (Note if you then immediately request a new page to proofread, the 'someone else' may be you! If you don't want to go proofread a different project instead, you can "Save as 'In Progress'" the page, 'Stop Proofreading' and follow the 'Start Proofreading' link. This will load the next available page, leaving the one you wanted to skip in your 'IN PROGRESS' section. When you have finished proofreading for the day, you can re-open it from there and press 'Return Page to Round' to immediately make it available for someone else to proofread.)

"This page is damaged or flawed so badly no one could proofread it."

Loads the Report Bad Page form.

Rarely, some damaged pages cannot be proofread. For instance, the image may be incomplete or unreadable, or the OCR text may be from a different image. In these cases, where some repairs have to be made to the files by the Project Manager, the page can be marked 'Bad' and removed from proofreading until fixed. Further information (including how to tell a truly bad page from a false alarm) is available on the Report Bad Page form itself. If you press the 'Submit Report' button on the Bad Page Report form, the page is now BAD; if you press the 'Cancel' button instead, the page is IN PROGRESS.

"I want to check this page with the automatic word checker."

Loads the WordCheck form. The text is checked for possible problems (misspelled words, scannos, etc). Problem words are presented as text boxes for possible correction. See also the WordCheck FAQ.

When done, the corrections made can be submitted (applied) or cancelled.

In either case the page is IN PROGRESS.

Page number

This shows the index number of the files on our site that contain the information (scanned image and OCR text) for the page in the book you are proofreading. It may vary from the printed page number of the book, since some of the pages that get scanned (such as introduction pages, some illustration pages) have no ordinary page numbers in the book, but still count as another page to be proofread on the site. Also some books have numbered pages that are otherwise blank, and sometimes these are not scanned, further throwing out the correspondence between the 'on site' page number and the 'printed' page number. If the OCR text matches the text in the image, then this is not a case of 'mismatched image/text', even if the page that was scanned was numbered, say, 10 in the book and is numbered, say, 21 on our site.

Proofread by:

This appears only in the second round. The name of the first-round proofreader is a link to send them a private message through the site's forum system. It is shown for your convenience should you wish to send the first-round proofreader a comment or question, (polite, constructive) criticism or praise on their proofreading of this page in the first round.

View Project Comments

Opens a copy of the Project Manager's Project Comments (NOT the full 'Project Comments' page) in a new browser window for reference.

View Image

Opens a copy of the png image file of the page you are proofreading in a new browser window. In Internet Explorer, if you hover your mouse over the image in this new window, a 'show actual size' icon will appear in the lower right corner. Clicking this will display the image in extreme close-up, which can be useful sometimes.

Image Resize:

These three buttons change the zoom of the image already loaded inside the main proofreading browser window. They can be useful in making out small, faded or blurry type in the scanned images.

Help for Proofreading Toolbox

Special Character Dropdowns

Many non-English texts have characters that can be difficult to enter from the keyboard. There are six drop-down lists of non-ASCII characters to assist in these cases.

The ones labelled A,E,I,O,U contain various accented versions, upper and lower case, of those respective characters. The final drop-down list contains other special symbols, and accented versions of some consonants like Y, C, D, N etc.

For any of the dropdown lists, select the character you want. It should appear at the insertion point in the text area of the proofreading interface.

Some people experience problems with these lists, such as not being able to select the same character twice in a row. We are aware of these difficulties and are working to solve them. A workaround is to select a different character in between, or copy-and-paste it from the earlier position (if still on the same page).

Also see the Proofreading Guidelines for other ways of entering special characters.

Greek transliteration popup

The most common non-Latin alphabet we encounter is Greek. We usually wish to transliterate Greek letters into Latin ones, and wrap the result in tags [Greek: ]. So

βιβλος

in the image is rendered

    [Greek: biblos]

in our proofread page.

To make it easier to select the correct transliterated characters, this tool has been provided. Click on the Greek button and a small window pops up, containing upper and lower case Greek alphabets and a text box.

All of the Greek letters in the popup box are clickable. Click the ones that appear in the Greek word in the image, and the Latin transliterations appear in the text box, from whence they can be cut-and-pasted into the proofread text and surrounded with [Greek: ] tags.

For more information please see the Proofreading Guidelines.

Common Tags

<i>, </i> (italic text), <b>, </b> (bold text), <sc>, </sc> (Small Caps text), Sidenote, Illustration, *, [ ], Footnote, /*, */ (poetry), /#, #/ (blockquote), * * * * * (thought break), Blank Page

Along the lower line of the proofreading toolbox in the lower pane of the proofreading interface are controls labelled with the common tags listed above. You can use these buttons to place tags into the proofreading text area. If you select text before you click on a button in the toolbox, the text will be surrounded by the respective tag.

The tags will also appear in the text boxes to the left of the Italic button. You can also copy and paste the tags from the text box if the select and surround feature does not work in your browser. These features are provided as a convenience; if you'd really rather type the tags in by hand you are welcome to.

For example, if the caption for an illustration is in your page, you can select the caption in the text box (by clicking your mouse at the start of the caption, and dragging the mouse to the end of the caption while keeping the button depressed), then click on the "Illustration" link in the proofreading toolbox, to have the desired tags inserted at the beginning and end of the caption.

In cases where a common tag is singular (such as the 'thought break' row of asterisks), you can select, say, a space character in the text where you want the tag to be added, and it will be positioned there when you click the tag link.

Note that [Blank Page] will clear any existing text in the proofreading window.

Shortcuts to insert common tags

Bold	Alt-b
Italics	Alt-i
Small caps	Alt-s
Select accent	Alt-\
Select markup	Alt-[,Alt-]

: Opens this help page.

If you have suggestions for how this documentation can be improved, or find an error in it, or can make a clarification, please post a message in this forum topic.