Roundless System
From DPCanadaWiki
This is a high-level description of a someday-in-the-future Roundless System of operation under consideration for DP. The origin for this idea was Charlz's Vision Paper of July 4, 2003. After we have operated stably for a year or so, it may be considered for DPC also.
Note that this is just a plan at this point. Much of it is still tentative; just ideas of how it would work. Nearly all of the details are undetermined at this time.
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Key Features
- work progresses as individual pages, not as a whole-book Project. Thus instead of the whole project moving thru rounds in sequence, individual pages proceed thru different stages at their own pace. The current rounds are replaced by various tasks that a page might go thru.
- Each page proceeds thru the system until it is 'done'. Easy pages may be proofed only 1 or 2 times; Hard pages may go thru proofing many, many times. 'Done' might be decided either by some objective, programmable criteria (ratio of corrections made since the previous proofing, etc.) or possibly as simple as the proofer marking that this page is 'done'.
- Each page is individually routed to various 'specialist' proofers/formatters, but only if that page needs that kind of processing. A page with tables would be routed to the tables processors; a page with indexes would be routed to the indexes team, a page with Greek would be routed to the Greek team, a page with font changes (bold, italic, blockquotes) would be routed to the formatters (and a page without such changes (like many easy novels) could skip the formatting process altogether). A simple, text-only page might only go through two proofings, 0 formattings, and be 'done'.
- Pages would be tagged to indicate which 'specialist' processing they need; then the system would automatically route them to the people who do that special processing. This tagging might be done in a meta-data scan before proofing (either by automated tools, or a review by experienced proofers, or both), or it might be done just by having the P1 proofer click on checkboxes saying that this page "contains tables", "contains indexes", "contains Greek", "contains font changes", etc.
- When all the pages are done, they are gathered together as a project and go through post-processing much as they do today.
Benefits
The main benefits anticipated in this Roundless system are a more efficient, concentrated proofing, and less wasteful, unneeded proofing.
- pages get as much or as little proofing as they need to get 'done'.
- pages with 'special' features go to experienced specialist proofers/formatters.
- pages without 'special' features don't have time wasted on specialized proofing/formatting.
Some Details
Specialist teams
These are not really 'teams', but just the term for a special group of volunteers who are qualified for a special proofing task, and have volunteered to do this. When such a volunteer logs in, and indicates that today they want to work on this special task, the system presents them with pages that are tagged as needing that special processing. So for example, a volunteer qualified for Indexing logs on & selects the Indexing task, they are shown a list of projects that have Index pages waiting to be proofed/formatted.
How are people selected for specialist teams? This hasn't really been decided, but the two main options seem to be:
- Restricted Qualification similar to P2, P3, F1, F2 now: the person must have proofed x number of pages, have been on-site for y days, and pass a quiz or diff evaluation, or
- Open Enrollment: anybody who is past the P1 Begin proofer stage can join any specialist team that they are interested in. Our current teams (Index Junkies, Table Turners, LaTexers, etc.) work this way, and they seem to get by fine with only peer pressure and mentoring of new members to keep acceptable quality standards. (Given the DP history of openness and volunteerism, I think we'll lean toward this option, possibly with just a bit of qualification.)
Tasks (replaces 'Rounds')
These are some of the suggested ones:
- P - proofing -- just like now, the basic compare-text-to-scan task.
- I - indexing -- work on pages containing indexes.
- L - lists -- work on pages containing lists.
- T - tables -- work on pages containing tables.
- C - calculations -- work on pages with calculation (mathematical or chemical) typesetting (often using LaTex).
- M - music -- work on pages containing music.
- F - font changes -- does the most common tasks of the current formatting rounds -- dealing with font changes (italics, bold, g e s p e r r t, SmallCaps, blockquotes, etc.).
- N - notes -- work on pages with footnotes, sidenotes, or endnotes.
- O - other language -- any 'other' language used on the page that is different than the language used in most of the book. For example, Greek in a mostly-English book, or Latin in a mostly-German book, etc.
- D - drama/poetry -- work on pages containing drama or poetry.
- G - graphics/illustrations -- work on pages containing graphics or illustrations. (This might be a post-processing task.)
- H - headings/spacing -- work on pages containing chapter headings, section headings, etc. and also on pages needing special spacing of lines.
- probably some others, too.
Each specific page might make multiple passes through each of these tasks. (Repeat until complete.) They would not be specifically labeled as 'rounds', like Tables1, Tables2, etc. but rather Tables pass 1, Tables pass 2, etc. (They would still be listed a T1, T2, etc. in places like the 'My Projects' page.)
