Guild of Writers

Shorah!

Over on the Guild of Maintainers Inspections forum we've been testing out and reporting on various ages.

One issue crops up regularly: typos, spelling errors and grammatical infelicities in journals and manuals. This bothers quite a few maintainers, and no doubt other nitpicky explorers will be complaining about them in times to come.

Andy Legate has explained how difficult it is to write manuals and journals into the code (apparently each book becomes a single, very long line of code). This makes it extremely unlikely that any Writer will be able or willing to go back into the code and reliably make corrections.

So here's an idea. Would it be helpful if the Guild of Maintainers offers a service of checking through the text of journals and manuals BEFORE they are written into the code of an age? If so, what would be the best way of doing this?

Great, great, great idea.

I will need this.

Show me what you're doing.

Show me how it's done.

Show me how text is inserted.

I'd be happy to check it

the GoW and GoMa could make a group of 10 people or so to check this. Just run through spelling errors and grammer problems and such. Whatever, let's see what happens tho

Well, how shall we test this?

Would someone like to put together a plain text file of what they want in a journal or manual? Explain the context too -- whether it is like Sharper's journal entries, or whether it is a teaching/explaining text for example. For this test run, I'll check it for spelling and grammar, and make corrections as necessary while keeping in mind the purpose of the text.

Then I'll get the revised text back for you to add the necessary control characters for later pasting into your code (if it works like that). Or I could even insert the control characters myself, with proper tuition. (I'm a professional editor, by the way.)

If we can find out what works well, I'll get a team up and running over at the GoMa forum to help out with this.

I'm techincally signed up in Guild of Maintainers... just haven't received a job.

This'd be right up my alley

Sure, if you can send me the file for Sharper's journal from Uru CC, then I can check it against my game.

Also, if I need a program OTHER than something like JEdit, then I'd be glad to set up this whole thing. I love looking at code (Matrix much?) so this'd be perfect. An hour a day analyzing and correcting errors would be fine by me.