User:Camomiletea/Tools

Abbyy Finereader

Setup (Tools->Options)

• Document tab:
  • New language called E-Book English which contains the Æ and æ ligatures. Set as default.
  • Document print type -> autodetect.
• Scan/Open tab:
  • Automatically analyze acquired images.
  • Enable image preprocessing
  • Detect page orientation
• Read tab:
  • Thorough reading.
  • One line of text per cell in table.
  • Do not use user patterns.
• Save tab, TXT sub-tab:
  • Keep line breaks (check for textw, uncheck for textwo)
  • Use blank line as paragraph separator.
• View
  • Show non-printable character
• Advanced
  • Spellchecker settings, which I'm probably never going to use within Abbyy, but if I did:
    • Correct spaces before and after punctuation marks.

More in User:Camomiletea/PM Routine.

Cpprep

For CPing. Why can't this be done by Guiprep, so we don't have two different programs? Not much to comment on.

CS Diff

Diff tool. I use this a lot. A little quirky if you compare files one of which is Unicode and the other is not. It's supposed to support Unicode, and for the most part works. I like the presentation of it better than WinMerge that I've also tried; I like the ability to see just the lines that changed, or the friendly mode with all of the text and the changes within it.

I use this in PP. Sometimes I do diffs on the output of various rounds prior to PPing, as sometimes proofers or formatters might make a little mistake. I also sometimes run diffs after PPing, to check if I did something wrong accidentally.

I also use this in CP: to check what changes I make to the OCR/Guiprep output, and avoid deleting page separators! very important.

EmEditor

Basic all-purpose text-editor. Need to check out EmEditor Professional, as it seems to have gotten more features I want, including a diff plug-in. And "replace in files".

Firefox

Particularly Web Developer extension. Most useful things that I've discovered so far:

• CSS
  • Disable CSS
  • View CSS
  • View Style Information
  • Edit CSS
• Images
  • Disable Images
  • Replace Images With Alt Attributes
• Information
  • Display Anchors
  • Display Id & Class Detail
  • View Document Outline
• Miscellaneous
  • Show Comments
• Tools
  • Validate CSS
  • Validate HTML
  • Validate Links
  • Validate Local Accessibility

The GIMP

Image editor.

Guiprep

For CPing. Some stuff it does, bugs me: like the automatic scanno corrections, most of which are good, but a few are false positives. It's not an option to pick and choose, all of the scanno corrections get applied. It also doesn't want to remember some of my settings... On the other hand, I like that it runs the pngcrush for me; that's fantastic.

Guiguts

Mostly for PPing, but more recently for CPing too.

Macromedia Dreamweaver

For projects where I generate a lot of HTML manually. That's for projects with lots of tables, lists, diagrams and other features, like A Bird's-Eye View of the Bible and The Century Handbook of Writing. I've set up a row of useful buttons that I use most often, but I've disabled the auto-completion which is super annoying.

pngcrush

For lossless compression of png files.

rfrank's software

I've used ppvtext and ppvhtml. Now ggprep, ggpost and ppspell look interesting too.

Scan Tailor

Sets DPI, Deskews images, creates nice margins, and the feature I'm most excited about -- allows to adjust how dark the text in the scan is going to be (which is not as easy with IrfanView or XnView). The downside is that it seems to be slower than IrfanView in its batch processing, and requires almost all the stages (orientation, split, deskew, select content, margin) to be run to produce any output. It can do black & white, or grayscale, or color or mixed. It can despeckle.

Old stuff

I've used Lilypond and Denemo for music before, but no more: Lilypond is difficult to learn, its standard keeps changing and it's not backward compatible. I used to have a little section on Jeebies, but now it's packaged in Guiguts.

I might need to remove rfrank's software section too since that's packaged in Guiguts now. Not sure yet.

Microsoft Office Document Imaging

This OCR program comes with Office 2003. I've used it at work, but not for DP purposes. And I won't anymore since I got Abbyy which is so much better and more convenient. Usage: It works with .tiff files; Tools -> Recognize using OCR; select text from the image and copy.