Looking for a volunteer proofreader

[plazman30]

A close friend of mine had his copy of Book 3 - Worlds and Adventures destroyed. I was setting up the PDF to make him a replacement POD copy for him. And then I decided to see if I could "redo" the book by doing an OCR export and cleaning it up. Things went swimmingly fast until I hit my first table. But by then I was committed. So, I powered on and recreated Book 3 as best I could. As mentioned in my previous post, this is NOT a line for line match. That's a fool's errand. But it has all the original text, along with the errata, and each section is on the right page number, and each table is on the right page number. I am on my 4th proofread to correct errors, and I think I am just correcting formatting errors.

But in my experience, no level of personal proofreading ever catches all the typos in a document. So I'm looking for some volunteers than can prove they own a copy of Book 3 that would do some voluntary proofreading.

Once I am happy there are no typos or rule errors, I'll get a POD made.

My goal is to convert this to use open-source fonts when I am all done. If I can do that, then I could give this to Mongoose Publishing to replace the current scanned copy.

I have to proofread about 5 more pages, and then I'll be ready to share with volunteer proofreaders.

 

[whartung]

I'm in, I'll read through it.

 

[plazman30]

OK, I'll try to get a file to you sometime this evening.

 

[plazman30]

While doing this, I discovered some formatting errata I cleaned up.

The book has a mix of 4 digit numbers that use a comma and don't. You'll find something like 1000, and 1,000 throughout the book. In my recreation, I made sure all numbers 4 digits or greater in the book always used commas for consistency.

I also noticed that the book used a dash (-) instead of a minus sign (−) in a lot of places. So, I cleaned that up.

And last, on page 38, second paragraph under THE PSIONICS INSTITUTE, the sentence says Such search takes one week. It should say Such a search takes one week to be grammatically correct.

I don't know if any of this stuff warrants entry into the errata doc, but I thought I would point it out.

 

[plazman30]

Now I’m getting this crazy idea… the hardest part of doing this was the tables. And Book 1 doesn’t have that many tables. I wonder how much work it would be to do Book 1. I clearly need a life.

 

[bookwyrm]

Now I’m getting this crazy idea… the hardest part of doing this was the tables. And Book 1 doesn’t have that many tables. I wonder how much work it would be to do Book 1. I clearly need a life.

(monotone voice with a little static feedback reverb) your - life - is - book - 1.

 

[plazman30]

What's neat is that now that the book is in a desktop publishing app (Scribus) and has proper paragraph and character styles, and has linked text boxes, I can easily change fonts, do some adjustments and I'm good to go.

I found an open-source clone of the font Univers called Perun. So, that eliminates licensing concerns with that font. But the cover and chapter headings uses Optima Medium, and I can't find an open source clone of that. I have an open-source clone of Optima, but only regular, bold, italic and bold italic. I'll post some pics in a second to show the comparison.

 

[plazman30]

Ok. here goes.

This is the original cover from the PDF:



This is my recreation using Optima:



And this is the closest free font I could find, called Linux Bollonium:

 

[plazman30]

For those that don't know why this is a big deal, it's all about licensing. When you use a commercial font for a print publication, you pay a one-time fee and off you go. If you want to use a font for digital distribution inside a PDF or ePub, you need a separate license that's a subscription. And that subscription will probably cost thousands of dollars PER YEAR. And the more copies you sell, the more you pay per year.

Here is what Optima would cost:


So, you need to pay $231 to buy the font and use it on your computer to make the book. Then if you want to sell the PDF, you need to pay $462 PER YEAR PER BOOK that the book is on sale for the right to do that.

So, you'd better hope you can sell well over $462 worth of each book, just to cover the price of the font.

And with new licenses that recently came out, licenses are NOT transferrable. So, say I make this book and turn it over to Mongoose to distribute as the "official" PDF, they need to buy their own licenses for desktop and electronic doc.

And if you wanted to stick these rulebooks on Roll20, or Demiplane. Well, now you need to buy a webfonts license ON TOP of the other twice licenses. And the annual price for that depends on the number of page views PER MONTH. Under 10,000 you're looking at around $300. Go over 100K, then you're looking at around $1200.

 

[whartung]

It's close enough for the spirit of the project, to be sure.

 

[plazman30]

It's close enough for the spirit of the project, to be sure.

True.

Sorry for the rant, but the state of font licensing really pisses me off.

Now if you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, then it comes with these fonts, and it includes the Electronic Doc license. But I am just some geek sitting in his basement hacking away at this stuff in my spare time. I'm not buying a $50/month Creative Cloud license.

To be fair, there are plenty of type foundries that have very reasonable pricing. But all the "classic" fonts we all know and love got bought up by Monotype and have this insane pricing model.

 

[Ildefonse]

In a universe with free will, choose the open-source font: it's close enough, and your freely given labor won't be wasted. Any who would complain can get a refund.

 

[plazman30]

I have an alternative I will try.