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Seeing right through it
When scanning text or images from a published source, the material on the back of the page can show through and be difficult to eliminate. This is not helped by the fact that most flat-bed scanners have a white surface under their lid. Place a black sheet (print your own if necessary) face down on the back of the page to be scanned. This will swallow the unwanted ‘show-through’ into a uniform grey background in the output, which is easily corrected out using the brightness and contrast controls in the scanning software...
read moreSend three-and-fourpence*
Some time ago I was struggling to understand why a book I was editing had so many homophone, or near-homophone, words, i.e., words which sounded like the right ones but were (perfectly spelt) wrong ones. Eventually I came across two entire homophone phrases, again perfectly spelt, which made no sense in the context when viewed as text, but when read aloud sounded correct. I finally ‘twigged’ that the manuscript was the output of a computerised dictation system, and asked the author to apply some basic quality control...
read moreThrough a scanner smartly*
A number of the books I have published are new editions of material from years ago for which the text has had to be scanned, and the scanning errors corrected, before final editing and typesetting could take place. I’m able to scan books in a non-destructive manner; that is, they remain intact and don’t need to be opened much beyond a right-angle to scan each page, so there’s no damage to their bindings. I’ve put some 15,000 pages through this process so far and I’ve become quite speedy at it, though it’s not something I’d...
read moreA discreet indication
Blokes Up North is the account by two Royal Marines officers, Kev Oliver and Tony Lancashire, of their journey by sail and oar in a small open boat through Canada’s Northwest Passage. It was a best-seller by the modest standards of Lodestar Books, which is why it is now out of print (the object of the exercise for a publisher!). The book was written by both authors in turn, a paragraph or two at a time, and we wanted some unobtrusive way to indicate the current ‘voice’. I came up with a discreet grey initial in the...
read moreThe case for the missing …
The late Ken Duxbury was an experienced and resourceful small boat sailor and a very engaging writer about his exploits, but he did have one habit I hoped to persuade him out of as I prepared his 1970s Lugworm trilogy for reissuing a few years ago: he would all too frequently end a sentence, generally at the end of a paragraph, with an ellipsis (…) as if to signal consequences of the foregoing events. I felt that for the reader (this one, anyway) this quickly became tiresome. Forget the dots and give us the credit...
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