Once again, there has been a long break between posts. This time it was because I have been so involved in getting my new book ready for release. the major cause for delay has been discovering a number of things that my regular spelling and grammar checker did not find. Here are a few examples:
When a person’s name is shortened to a single letter abbreviation it need a period after the letter. No warning from my spelling checker about that.
Many other abbreviations also need a period, like Jr. and St. and Ave. It doesn’t matter if St was used to replace street or saint, both need the period, and neither were flagged by my spelling check.
I also had to rebuild my personal dictionary of name to disregard.
Possessive status is formed by adding “‘s” (or just “‘” if the name ends in s). The spelling check seems to think these were all simply plural forms.
I don’t like to have hyphenated words in my text. When I removed some cases, there were others that ceased to be at the end of a line. Those were often just copied as they were into the middle of another line, and with the hyphen, followed by a space, included.
When an individual’s name can be spelled more than one way. such as “Levi” or “Levy” it would have been nice to be alerted that there was a possible inconsistency in the use of the name. Of course, I received no such warning. That was one reason I had to rebuild my private dictionary. If I tagged names to be disregarded, then every case was skipped from that point on.
I chose to include a lot of photographs and embed them in the text rather than put them in separate pages. For photos to print clearly they should be at a higher level of resolution than what is needed for computer screen display. I learned from experience that not all programs that claim to improve resolution (change DPI) work the same way. Sometimes the resolution is also degraded by changing the size of the picture on the page here it placed.
If you want to display certain categories of names in a particular way, there is no way to ensure this other than by changing the names during proof reading or composition. In my case, names of ships are being displayed as all Capital letters and names of newspapers are displayed in Italics. It took an extra pass on the entire book to ensure all such instances were displayed correctly.
As things stand now, A Century in Charleston will be released for sale on November 30th. It’ about my family (blood relatives) and the times and places in which they lived.
Wetherhorn 