+Editing

Overview

  • Aim for perfect text and formatting (markdown instructions here).
  • Please strive to understand every work and sentence you edit. प्रत्येकं वाक्यं व्याकरणशुद्ध्या ऽवगत्य शोधयितुं यतताम्।
  • Quality over quantity. Don’t hurry - stay within daily agreed work limit. More daily work sometimes implies more errors.
  • Follow multi-script proofreading.

Contribution levels

Our expectation: when we read the corrected text, we expect to have atleast the same experience as reading the original pdf (if not better). Even otherwise, if you leave the text in a significantly better state than earlier, it is valuable.

  • Top level: Perfect text and formatting.
  • Next level: Perfect text, with basic formatting. Reader won’t feel particular urge to consult the source most of the time.
  • Next level: Almost perfect text (possibly missing diacritics and accents), with basic formatting (contiguous paragraphs, footnotes etc.).
  • And so on.

We generlly expect top level contribution from paid proofreaders.

Often, OCR makes very few mistakes (<5) on a page if the print is good. It probably takes more human hours to add structure than to proofread. We should take structure seriously.

Multi-script proofreading

  • The text should be examined in multiple scripts (as agreed earlier). Eg. devanAgarI and ISO, or devanAgarI and kannaDa. Script conversion may be accomplished using aksharamukhA.
  • Problem being solved: In some scripts, it is hard to distinguish some characters; and mAtra-s may be missed. For example, in devanAgarI - ब‌ व, म स; in IAST/ISO ki kī, ku kū, in kannaDa ದ ಧ ಥ, ಡ ಢ. A proofreader proficient in sanskrit once read “प्लोनेन परिमार्जनानन्तरं तदुक्तं पाद्यं चाधिकमुक्तम् । अत्रापि स एव हेतरनुमन्धेयः ।” as “प्लोतेन परिमार्जनानन्तरं तद् उक्तं, पाद्यं चाधिकम् उक्तम् । अत्रापि स एव हेतुर् अनुसन्धेयः ।”

Typing correct symbols

  • Please use the correct symbols. Common mistakes: |(pipe) instead of ।(daNDa), :(colon) instead of visarga(ः), ०(शून्यम्) instead of ॰ (devanAgarI abbreviation sign).

Special characters

If you cannot type unusual unicode characters, copy them from here and paste.

  • IAST diacritics

    • ā Ā ī Ī ū Ū ṛ Ṛ ṝ Ṝ ḷ Ḷ ḹ Ḹ
    • ṃ Ṃ ḥ Ḥ
    • ṅ Ṅ ñ Ñ
    • ṭ Ṭ ḍ Ḍ
    • ś Ś ṣ Ṣ

  • ISO

    • ē ō r̥ r̥̄ l̥ l̥̄ ṁ

  • Vedic Svaras

    • ॒ ॑

  • No harm using ISO instead of IAST - we can fix it later.

  • No harm ignoring initial letter capitalization (ie ṣ instead of Ṣ and so on).

Things to ignore

  • Quotation mark placement which is not ‘bad’ as described in examples above - ie. don’t spend time trying to make it ‘best’.
  • Empty spaces in lines. Don’t spend time correcting spaces like this.