Character suites for Project Managers

Project managers will want to have at least a basic understanding of DP's character suites.

What do we use character suites for

Part of the task of setting up a project is selecting which character suites to use for it. They are used to define which characters are valid for proofreaders to use in the rounds. They also define which characters are valid to be loaded into a project at project creation time.

The good news is, for the majority of the books we work on the default Basic Latin character suite provides everything you need. It contains the letters, punctuation, numerals, and symbols needed for most books in Western European languages.

But, given the wide range of books we work on, sometimes the need for other characters comes up. When that happens, character suites are a way we can make those additional characters available for our proofreaders to use.

In addition to pre-composed character suites, PMs may also define Custom characters for their projects.

Which suites do we have

The All Character Suites page has the definitive list of character suites installed on the site and their status as enabled or disabled.

Currently active suites:

• Basic Latin
• Extended European Latin (Additional Latin letters used in European languages not fully supported by Basic Latin)
  • Extended European Latin A (characters for Esperanto, Welsh, Sami, Romanian and Hungarian)
  • Extended European Latin B (characters for Slovenian, Estonian, Czech, Slovak, and Latvian)
  • Extended European Latin C (characters for Polish, Croatian, Lithuanian, and Maltese)
• Basic Greek: The basic unmarked Greek alphabet.
• Polytonic Greek: All of the characters in the Basic Greek character suite, plus Greek characters with accents and breathing marks, most commonly used in DP-era books.
• Medievalist supplement (Supplementary characters for medieval texts)
• Semitic and Indic transcriptions (Additional characters used for writing languages like Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit in Romanized form.)
• Symbols collection (Astronomical, zodiac with VS15, small number of music and apothecary symbols)
• Math symbols (Additional symbols that may be found in math-heavy texts)

How do we use suites

When you create or edit a project you can select from the list of enabled suites in the character suite field of project information. More than one character suite can be active for a project. The associated pickersets for all active character suites will be displayed in the proofreading interface toolbox, for proofreaders working on your project to use.

You may find, occasionally, characters are identified during proofreading, which merit adding an additional character suite for the project. You can do this by editing the project. However, removing a character suite once you have loaded text into a project is strongly discouraged, because that could render the text in some pages no longer valid.

If you select any suites other than Basic Latin, please mention in the project comments what characters you expect the proofreaders to run into.

Considerations

It is up to Project Managers to decide when or if an additional character suite is appropriate. You are not required to have coverage in a project for every single character that occurs in its book.

Please make an effort to only add character suites (and custom characters) that are most suitable for the project. Adding character suites "just in case" is discouraged. Please ask in the help with character suites and custom characters topic in the event of any uncertainty.

Deciding to add a character suite or individual character for a project can be based on how frequently it occurs.

For example, if a particular character only appears twice in a book, it might be easier to just instruct proofreaders to leave a [**note] where it occurs. Or if the only Greek that appears in the book is one short sentence on the title page, you may want to transcribe it outside of the proofing process.

On the other hand, characters that commonly appear in your book are probably desirable to have available for proofreaders to use.