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Editor manual

Detailed notes (if you want them) on how to use our page editor

Our simple and powerful page editor makes it easy to proofread a printed page. This document describes how to use our page editor.

If you instead want to learn more about our proofing work and how you can get started, see our beginner's guide.

The navigation bar

The page editor starts with a simple navigation bar, which you can see below:

/ 14 Image 14 of 200 (Page 14)

Proofed once
The navigation bar for a sample project.

The navigation bar shows that we're viewing page 14 of the मधुराविजयम् project. You can click on the name of the project to return to the main project page.

The History link will take you to the full edit history for this page, and the and links will take you to the previous and next page, respectively.

Finally, the Proofread once text shows that one person has reviewed this page and judged that its transcription was accurate.

The menu bar

Below the navigation bar is the menu bar, which you can see below:

A menu bar with multiple options available.

The menu bar contains various features to help you transcribe a page.

Layout lets you change the layout of different parts of the editor:

  • Image right, text left shows the image to the right of the text. This view is great for simple texts and for viewing the page as a whole.

  • Image above, text below shows the image on the right and the text on the left. This view is great for complicated work or for focusing on individual words.

Markup lets you annotate different parts of the text:

  • Use Mark as error to annotate typos in the source text. We will not display these errors in our final text, but it's important to keep track of them so that it's clear which changes came from the source text an which changes came from our own judgment.

  • Use Mark as fix to annotate fixes to errors in the source text.

  • Use Mark as unclear to annotate text that is difficult to read or understand. Other more experienced proofers can help take a look and resolve the issue.

  • Use Mark as footnote to annotate footnote numbers and letters. For details on what you should annotate, see our complete proofing guide.

Transliterator lets you convert the text you select into Devanagari or IAST. The transliterator is useful if you don't have any other way to type Devanagari or IAST on your computer.

  • Use From to define the input encoding. We currently support ITRANS and Harvard-Kyoto.

  • Use To to define the output script. We currently support Devanagari and IAST.

Characters lets you quickly select special characters that are hard to type. These include various accented Roman characters and a few special Devanagari symbols.

Help loads the page you're reading right now.

The text editor

Next is the text editor, which you can see below:

A text editor with multiple options.

If the text box doesn't have any content, you should first click the big Run OCR button in the upper-left. This button will run optical character recognition, a sophisticated machine learning algorithm that will try to recognize all of the letters in the original image.

The A+ and A- buttons in the upper-right let you change the text size, in case you find it hard to read.

  • Use A+ to increase the text size.

  • Use A- to decrease the text size.

The image viewer

Next we have the image viewer, which you can see below:

An image viewer with various options. No image is displayed.

The image viewer contains various controls that let you change the image's zoom and rotation. We provide these controls so that you can view an image comfortably and clearly.

  • Use 🔍+ to zoom in and increase the image size.

  • Use 🔍0 to reset the image zoom.

  • Use 🔍- to zoom out and decrease the image size.

  • Use to rotate the image counterclockwise by 90 degrees.

  • Use to rotate the image clockwise by 90 degrees.

The submission form

Last but not least, we have the submission form, which you can see below:

By saving your changes, you agree to release your contribution under the CC0 (public domain) license.

Publish changes
The submission form.

If your change is subtle, you can leave an optional summary of your changes. Most changes don't need an explicit summary.

The Status dropdown is critical, as it lets others know what the status of this page is:

  • Use Needs more work if the page doesn't look good to you.

  • Use Proofread once if the page looks good to you.

  • Use Proofread twice if the page looks good to you and someone else has marked it as Proofread once.

  • Use No useful text if the page is empty or irrelevant to the project.

How to get more help

If you still have questions or comments about this tool, the easiest way to let us know about them is to contact us directly. We'll get back to you as soon as we can.