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Instructions

Introduction

All of the magazines on the site have been run through an optical character recognition (OCR) tool, which converts the images in the PDF files to text. Unfortunately, OCRing is by no means perfect, and the text produced still has a reasonable number of errors. This is where you can help. From the tracking page, download one of the PDFs, and then click through to the corresponding text. You will see something like this:

Don't get too alarmed by the garble of text! If you are logged in, you will be able to see the Edit this page button, which will allow you to do exactly that!

If you click the Edit this page button, you'll see some text that looks something like this:

A bit more readable, but still in need of some work. Time to get going!

Text corrections

Generally speaking, the aim is to get the text content exactly the same as in the PDF. Formatting is of secondary importance. The fundamental formatting tool is the paragraph, which is two line breaks (ie one blank line) - a single line break is not enough. Eg

This is a paragraph

This is the next paragraph

While in general the content should be the same as the PDF, the following changes should be made:

  • Page headers and footers should be removed eg
    January 1992           The Sydney Bushwalker          Page 5
  • Advertisements should be removed altogether
  • Images should be removed altogether (along with any text directly relating to that image). However, if that image is particularly important, such as a map relating to a walk, you can leave a note on the tracking page that it should be included.
  • People’s names should be corrected, if you know they are incorrect eg Ian Wolf should be Ian Wolfe. If a member is only mentioned by their first or last name in an article, and you know who it is, try and add their full name in brackets eg Tom [Tom Wenman]
  • Place names should be corrected, if you know they are incorrect eg Wollangambe, not Wallangambe or Wollangambie
  • If a place name has a more recent, or common alternative name, add it in brackets eg Wallara Canyon [Dione Dell]
  • Note also that place names by convention do not have apostrophes eg Coxs River, not Cox’s River – if you find these, please correct them
  • Fix general spelling errors where noted
  • Punctuation and grammar may be corrected, but this is often a matter of taste, so only correct where it is clearly wrong
  • Separators such as ******** or ======== should be removed

Text formatting

The number one priority is to get the text corrected. However, it will certainly help us if you can spend a bit of extra time to get it into a more readable format.

As mentioned above, the most important thing is the paragraph - leave a blank line to automatically create one.

If you would also like to format the resulting text, please use the following conventions where possible. Note that recent newsletters may have a fair bit of formatting, so some of these conventions may be difficult to follow:

  • Use bold (**bold**) in place of underlined/capitalised text, except in story titles, in which case…
  • Use Heading 2 (===== Heading 2 =====) for story titles, and Heading 3 (==== Heading 3 ====) for subtitles. Please use proper case, even if the original was capitalised, unless absolutely needed.
  • Use a table for the index, and any other text requiring aligned columns. See the syntax for how to create a table, or copy and paste from the example magazine below.

Avoid using the forced line break (\\) except where absolutely needed eg poems. Use a normal paragraph break in most cases.

Example

For an example of a largely complete magazine, see January 1992. If you click on Edit this page (you need to be logged in), you can also see examples of all of the formatting.

For post April 1994 editions, have a look at December 1999, as the format of the magazine changed.

I made a mistake...

If you make a mistake while editing, and you haven't saved the page, you can just navigate away from the page. This will lose any of your changes.

If you accidentally save a mistake, you can revert to an old version by using the Old revisions button.

You can also copy text from old revisions, for example, if you accidentally deleted a section.

There's a problem with the PDF

If you find a problem with the PDF - missing pages, pages the wrong way round, unreadable pages etc - send me an email at website@ozultimate.com

Tracking Page

If you are working on a particular magazine, please update the tracking page. You can add an entry like In progress (Tom) or Complete (Tom) to let others know that you are working on, or have finished a magazine. Only use Complete when you have entirely finished, including formatting.

Ready to go!

When you are ready to start editing, see the list of magazines!

Thanks for helping out!

instructions.txt · Last modified: 2015/08/06 23:36 by sbw
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