User:Gorok/PP/Checklist/Sequential Inspection

This is the only step in which you will examine the whole ASCII text in sequence; hereafter you navigate with searches. Some Post Processors still read the book carefully, although this is not as crucial as it used to be under the old two-round system. Others skim the text comparing it to the page images and double-checking format.

This step has several purposes. One important purpose is to become familiar with the book, get a feeling how the book handles different things and how it is structured. You also should become aware of any potential issues that will arise during PP. However you do not have to deal with those issues yet, so far it is enough to know they are there. Therefore the things in this step should not require decisions yet—decisions are saved for a later step—and should be quite straightforward. Another important purpose is to make sure everything is marked in a way that enables you to navigate with searches later. So it is important to make sure everything is marked up correctly—and preferably consistently. To utilize this feel free to add as many [**notes] in your book at this step as you like :). There is one more purpose which has to do with the formatting done by the F2. You may not like it, but F2 do make errors sometimes (well actually not only F2 make errors, P3 make them too, and PP, and PPV, and even you ;) ). The amount of errors can vary greatly between faultless and half of the markup missing. But if you do not check you have no way to tell. This does not have to be a full F3 pass, but you should not just take the F2 output and assume everything is marked up perfectly fine and all you have to do is press a few buttons and you have a finished book. Besides there are 2 more reasons to check the markup. Firstly the book was likely done by more than 1 F2 and chances are that they have handled things differently, but you want them to be handled consistenly (having it consistently wrong but in a way that enables you to fix it automatically maybe is better than having it inconsistently.) Secondly, maybe your opinion differs from that of your F2. They marked it with <tb> but you think that are chapters? You are the PP and you can decide how it should be done. But to make decisions you have to know there are decisions to make and not just leave it to the F2.

Additionally you can do part of the Scanno Check at this step. To do this use the automatic scanno highlighting and have Guiguts highlight all possible scannos for you (well actually that is: all you tell it to highlight.) While you page through the book you can check all those highlighted words on the image. For German books use the wordlist possible_bad_words.ger.txt, for English books use the wordlist en-common.txt (that comes with Guiguts). If you add things like Footnote, tb, i, etc. (the text used in the formatting tags) to those text files it even highlights nearly all the formatting for you.

Check for:

• Proper markup of <i>italic</i> and <b>bold</b> etc. (<g>, <sc>, <f>, ...).
  • watch for punctuation wrongly contained in markups, such as <i>(ibid.</i> or <b>Subtopic.</b>.
  • fix markup that spans across page boundaries.
    That is: remove the closing markup at the end of the page and the opening markup at the beginning of the next page.
• Proper markup of Greek and other transliterations (content check later)
• Block material all marked in some fashionThis is to ensure those can be found later.
  • poetry, misc. tabular in /* */
    Usually anything that should not be rewrapped.
  • block quotes in /# #/
    Usually anything that should be set off in some way but may be rewrapped.
  • fix block markups that cross page boundaries now or in the next step.
    That is: join the markups like there is no page boundary—as indeed those page separators will be gone later, when it is time to rewrap. Just treat the page separators like the complete lines were not there at all.
• Figures properly in [Illustration: caption]
  • consistent spelling, abbreviation, capitalization in captions
  • move outside paragraph to next or prior page as appropriate
• Footnotes properly marked in [Footnote A/1: content].
  • join footnotes that are continued on the next page(s)
  • move behind the paragraph they are referenced.
    This enables you to leave the footnotes behind the paragraph they are referenced in if you later chose to have them this way. Additionally it makes sure they are placed consistently. You can later move them behind chapters, or the whole text, or even to custom locations easily, but it is not possible to move them easily behind their paragraph.
  • make sure all footnotes within a paragraph use a different footnote number/symbol.
    This avoids problems with the Footnote Fixup later.
• Sidenotes properly marked in [Sidenote: content].
  • move outside paragraph to next or prior page as appropriate
• Make notes of things that will need attention in the HTML:
  • author cross-references like "(p. 150)" and "see page 222" that should become links.
  • how the editor laid out special sections such as tables and sidebars.