Copy Editing

These are the steps for copyediting pages from the Scarlet Letter archives.

   1. Save page to your harddrive
         1. In Internet Explorer:
               1. Go to File->SaveAs.  Save as a TEXT file.
         2. In Mozilla Firefox
               1. Go to File->Save Page As...
               2. APPEND ".txt" to Filename
               3. SELECT Button: Save as type:  Text Files
   2. Open File
         1. DO NOT USE Microsoft Word
         2. Open File with a Text Editor
               1. On Windows machines, use WordPad
         3. The webpage will either be saved as a ".htm" or a ".txt" file
         4. On Windows machines, you may need to use the "File of
Type" button to see all types of files.
   3. Look for markup.
         1. DO NOT USE Microsoft Word. Word does not display markup.
         2. If there is any HTML markup, stop immediately and contact me.
         3. HTML markup is all angle-bracketed text.
         4. Signs of markup
               1. <html> at top of file
               2. </html> at bottom of file
               3. <p> within file
               4. </p> within file.
   4. Copy edit document against the PDF-format file on the website.
   5. Do not copy edit poetry.
   6. SLUG HTML file(s) against PDF file.
         1. Make sure the words match
         2. Do not do any other further copy editing.
   7. Correct Spelling Errors.
         1. If file is open, close it.
         2. Reopen the text file in Microsoft Word or any other spell
checking program.
         3. Run Spellcheck
         4. Spelling errors
               1. Either Match or Correct the word
                     1. I would prefer that words match the original.
                     2. It is okay if they do not match the original
and are spelled correctly.
                     3. Checking against the original is time
consuming and not really necessary.
                     4. Either Matching or Correcting the word is acceptable.
   8. Correct Misrecognition Errors:
         1. Misrecognition errors are different from spelling errors.
         2. Look for shape similarities rather than orthography.
         3. Examples:
               1. M=> |V|
               2. W=>VV
   9. Correct Arrangement Errors:
         1. OCR Breaks the image up into regions.  Sometimes, it
misplaces regions when reassembling the text.
  10. Fix all errors in the text file
         1. Do not Format any text
         2. Check paragraph breaks.
         3. Delete Headers and Footers
               1. Page numbers
               2. Journal Name, Date, etc
  11. Save File
  12. Check for markup
         1. Reopen file in text editor and look for markup.