Gutcheck documentation

gutcheck:  lists possible common formatting errors in a Project

Gutenberg candidate file. It is a command line program and can be used

under Win32 or Unix (gutcheck.c should compile anywhere; if it doesn't,

tell me). For Windows-only people, there is an appendix at the end

with brief instructions for running it.

Current version: 0.99. Users of 0.98 see end of file for changes.

You should also have received the licence file COPYING, a README file, 

gutcheck.c, the source code, and gutcheck.exe, a DOS executable, with

this file.

This software is Copyright Jim Tinsley 2000-2005.

Gutcheck comes wih ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details, read the file COPYING.

This is Free Software; you may redistribute it under certain conditions (GPL).

See http://gutcheck.sourceforge.net for the latest version.

Usage is: gutcheck [-setopxlywm] filename

      where:

      -s checks Single quotes 

      -e switches off Echoing of lines 

      -t checks Typos

      -o produces an Overview only

      -p sets strict quotes checking for Paragraphs

      -x (paranoid) switches OFF typo checking and extra checks

      -l turns off Line-end checks

      -y sets error messages to stdout

      -w is a special mode for web uploads (for future use)

      -v (verbose) forces individual reporting of minor problems

      -m interprets Markup of some common HTML tags and entities    

      -u warns about words in a user-defined typo file gutcheck.typ 

      -d ignores some DP-specific markup

Running gutcheck without any parameters will display a brief help message.

Sample usage: 

    gutcheck warpeace.txt

More detail:

    Echoing lines (-e to switch off)

      You may find it convenient, when reviewing Gutcheck's 

      suggestions, to see the line that Gutcheck is questioning.

      That way, you can often see at a glance whether it is

      a real error that needs to be fixed, or a false positive

      that should be in the text, but Gutcheck's limited

      programming doesn't understand.

      By default, gutcheck echoes these lines, but if you don't 

      want to see the lines referred to, -e will switch it OFF.

    Quotes (-s and -p switches)

      Gutcheck always looks for unbalanced doublequotes in a 

      paragraph. It is a common convention for writers not to

      close quotes in a paragraph if the next paragraph opens

      with quotes and is a continuation by the same speaker.

      Gutcheck therefore does not normally report unclosed quotes 

      if the next paragraph begins with a quote. If you need

      to see all unclosed quotes, even where the next paragraph

      begins with a quote, you should use the -p switch.

      Singlequotes (') are a problem, since the same character

      is used for an apostrophe. I'm not sure that it is 

      possible to get 100% accuracy on singlequotes checking,

      particularly since dialect, quite common in PG texts,

      upsets the normal rules so badly. Consider the sentence:

        'Tis often said that a man's a man for a' that.

      As humans, we recognize that both apostrophes are used

      for contractions rather than quotes, but it isn't easy 

      to get a program to recognize that.

      Since Gutcheck makes too many mistakes when trying to match

      singlequotes, it doesn't look for unbalanced singlequotes

      unless you specify the -s switch.

      Consider these sentences, which illustrate the main cases:

        'Tis often said that a fool and his money are soon parted.

        'Becky's goin' home,' said Tom.

        The dogs' tails wagged in unison.

        Those 'pack dogs' of yours look more like wolves.

    Typos (-t switch)

      It's not Gutcheck's job to be a spelling checker, but it

      does check for a list of common typos and OCR errors if you

      use the -t switch. (The -x switch also turns typo checking on.)

      It also checks for character combinations, especially involving

      h and b, which are often confused by OCR, that rarely or never

      occur. For example, it queries "tbe" in a word. Now, "the" often

      occurs, but "tbe" is very rare (heartbeat, hotbed), so I'm

      playing the odds - a few false positives for many errors found.

      Similarly with "ii", which is a very common OCR error.

      Gutcheck suppresses multiple reporting of the first 40 "typos"

      found. This is to remove the annoyance of seeing something like

      "FN" (footnote) or "LK" (initials) flagged as a typo 147 times

      in a text. 

    Line-end checking (-l switch to disable)

      All PG texts should have a Carriage Return (CR - character 13)

      and a Line Feed (LF - character 10) at end of each line,

      regardless of what O/S you made them on. DOS/Windows, Unix

      and Mac have different conventions, but the final text should

      always use a CR/LF pair as its line terminator.

      By default, Gutcheck verifies that every line does have

      the correct terminator, but if you're on a work-in-progress

      in Linux, you might want to convert the line-ends as a final

      step, and not want to see thousands of errors every time you

      run Gutcheck before that final step, so you can turn off 

      this checking with the -l switch.

    Paranoid mode (-x switch to disable: Trust No One :-)

      -x switches OFF typo-checking, the -t flag, automatically

      and some extra checks like standalone 1 and 0 queries.

    Overview mode (-o switch)

       This mode just gives a count of queries found

       instead of a detailed list.

    Header quote  (-h switch)

       If you use the -h switch, gutcheck will also display

       the Title, Author, Release and Edition fields from the

       PG header. This is useful mostly for the automated

       checks we do on recently-posted texts.

    Errors to stdout (-y switch)

       If you're just running gutcheck normally, you can ignore

       this. It's only there for programs that provide a front

       end to gutcheck. It makes error messages appear within

       the output of gutcheck so that the front end knows whether

       gutcheck ran OK.

    Verbose reporting (-v switch)

       Normally, if gutcheck sees lots of long lines, short lines,

       spaced dashes, non-ASCII characters or dot-commas ".," it

       assumes these are features of the text, counts and summarizes

       them at the top of its report, but does not list them 

       individually. If the -v switch is on, gutcheck will list them all.

    Markup interpretation (-m switch)

       Normally, gutcheck flags anything it suspects of being HTML

       markup as a possible error. When you use the -m switch,

       however, it matches anything that looks like markup against

       a short list of common HTML tags and entities. If the markup

       is in that list, it either ignores the markup, in the case

       of a tag, or "interprets" the markup as its nearest ASCII 

       equivalent, in the case of an entity. So, for example, using

       this switch, gutcheck will "see"

       &ldquo;He went <i>thataway!</i>&rdquo;

       as

       "He went thataway!"

       and report accordingly.

       This switch does not, not, NOT check the validity of HTML;

       it exists so that you can run gutcheck on most HTML texts

       for PG, and get sane results. It does not support all tags.

       It does not support all entities. When it sees a tag or entity

       it does not recognize, it will query it as HTML just as if

       you hadn't specified the -m switch.

       Gutcheck 0.99 will automatically switch on markup interpretation

       if it sees a lot of tags that appear to be markup, so mostly, you

       won't have to specify this.

    User-defined typos (-u switch)

        If you have a file named gutcheck.typ either in your current

        working directory or in the directory from which you explicitly

        invoked gutcheck, but not necessarily on your path, and if you

        specify the -u switch, gutcheck will query any word specified 

        in that file. The file is simple: one word, in lower case, per

        line. 999 lines are allowed for. Be careful not to put multiple

        words onto a line, or leave any rubbish other than the word on

        the line. You should have received a sample file gutcheck.typ

        with this package.

    Ignore DP markup (-d switch)

        Distributed Proofreaders (http://www.pgdp.net) is currently

        (2005) the main source of PG texts, and proofers there use

        special conventions. This switch understands those conventions,

        so that people can use gutcheck on files in process that still

        haven't had the special conventions removed yet. The special

        conventions supported in 0.99 are page-separators and

        "<sc>", "</sc>", "/*", "*/", "/#", "#/", "/$", "$/".

You will probably only run gutcheck on a text once or maybe twice,

just prior to uploading; it usually finds a few formatting problems;

it also usually finds queries that aren't problems at all - it often

questions Tables of Contents for having short lines, for example.

These are called "false positives", and need a human to decide on

them.

The text should be standard prose, and already close to PG normal

format (plain text, about 70 characters per line with blank lines

between paragraphs).

Gutcheck merely draws your attention to things that might be errors.

It is NOT a substitute for human judgement. Formatting choices like

short lines may be for a reason that this program can't understand.

Even the most careful human proofing can leave errors behind in a

text, and there are several automated checks you can do to help find

them. Of these, spellchecking (with _very_ careful human judgement) is

the most important and most useful.

Gutcheck does perform some basic typo-checking if you ask it to,

but its focus is on formatting errors specific to PG texts - 

mismatched quotes, non-ASCII characters, bad spacing, bad line

length, HTML tags perhaps left from a conversion, unbalanced

brackets.

Suggestions for additional checks would be appreciated and duly 

considered, but no guarantees that they will be implemented.

                How do _I_ use it?

Practically everyone I give gutcheck to asks me how _I_ use it.

Well, when I get a text for posting, say filename.txt, I run

    gutcheck -o filename.txt

That gives me a quick idea what I'm dealing with. It'll tell

me what kind of problems gutcheck sees, and give me an idea 

of how much more work needs to be done on the text. Keep in 

mind that gutcheck doesn't do anything like a full spellcheck,

but when I see a text that has a lot of problems, I assume that

it probably needs a spellcheck too.

Having got a feel for the ballpark, I run

    gutcheck filename.txt > jj

where jj is my personal, all-purpose filename for temporary data

that doesn't need to be kept. Then I open filename.txt and jj in

a split-screen view in my editor, and work down the text, fixing

whatever needs fixing, and skipping whatever doesn't. If your 

editor doesn't split-screen, you can get much the same effect by 

opening your original file in your normal editor, and jj (or your

equivalent name) in something like Notepad, keeping both in view 

at the same time.

Twice a day, an automatic process looks at all recently-posted

texts, and emails Michael, me, and sometimes other people with

their gutcheck summaries.

        Future development of gutcheck

Gutcheck has gone about as far as it can, given its current

structure. In order to add better singlequotes checking,

sentence checking, better he/be checking and other good stuff

that I'd like to see, I'll have to rewrite it from a different

angle - looking at the syntax instead of the lines. And I'll

probably get around to that sooner or later.

Meantime, I'm just trying to get this version stabilized, so

please report any bugs you find. When it is stable, I'll run

up a Windows port for those timid souls who can't look a 

command line in the eye. :-)

And I've started work on gutspell, a companion to gutcheck

which will concentrate on spelling problems. PG spelling

problems are unusual, since the range of texts we cover is

so wide, and I'll be taking a somewhat unorthodox approach

to writing this spelling-checker _specifically_ for texts

containing a lot of dialect and uncommon words that have

probably already been spell-checked against a standard

modern dictionary.

Explanations of common gutcheck messages:

    --> 74 lines in this file have white space at end

    PG texts shouldn't have extra white space added at end of line.

    Don't worry too much about this; they're not doing any harm,

    and they'll be removed during posting anyway.

    --> 348 lines in this file are short. Not reporting short lines.

    --> 84 lines in this file are long. Not reporting long lines.

    --> 8 lines in this file are VERY long!

    If there are a lot of long or short lines, Gutcheck won't list

    them individually. The short lines version of this message

    is commonly seen when gutchecking poetry and some plays, where

    the normal line length is shorter than the standard for prose.

    A "VERY long" line is one over 80 characters.  You normally

    shouldn't have any of these, but sometimes you may have to render

    a table that must be that long, or some special preformatted

    quotation that can't be broken.

    --> There are 75 spaced dashes and em-dashes in this file. Not reporting them.

    The PG standard for an emdash--like these--is two minus signs

    with no spaces before or after them. However, some older texts

    used spaced dashes - like these -- and if there are very many

    such spaced dashes in the file, gutcheck just draws your

    attention to it and doesn't list them individually.

    Line 3020 - Non-ASCII character 233

    Standard PG texts should use only ASCII characters with values

    up to 127; however, non-English, accented characters can be 

    represented according to several different non-ASCII encoding 

    schemes, using values over 127. If you have a plain English text

    with a few accented characters in words like cafe or tete-a-tete,

    you should replace the accented characters with their unaccented 

    versions. The English pound sign is another commonly-seen

    non-ASCII character. If you have enough non-ASCII characters in

    your text that you feel removing them would degrade your text

    unacceptably, you should probably consider doing an 8-bit text

    as well as a plain-ASCII version.

    Line 1207 - Non-ISO-8859 character 156

    Even in "8-bit" texts, there are distinctions between code sets.

    The ISO-8859 family of 8-bit code sets is the most commonly used

    in PG, and these sets do not define values in the range 128 through

    159 as printable characters. It's quite common for someone on a

    Windows or Mac machine to use a non-ISO character inadvertently,

    so this message warns that the character is not only not ASCII,

    but also outside the ISO-8859 range.

    Line 46 - Tab character?

    Some editors and WPs will put in Tab characters (character 9) to

    indicate indented text. You should not use these in a PG text,

    because you can't be sure how they will appear on a reader's

    screen. Find the Tab, and replace it with the appropriate number

    of spaces.

    Line 1327 - Tilde character?

    The tilde character (~) might be legitimately used, but it's the

    character commonly used by OCR software to indicate a place where

    it couldn't make out the letter, so gutcheck flags it.

    Line 1347 - Asterisk?

    Asterisks are reported only in paranoid mode (see -x). 

    Like tildes, they are often used to indicate errors, but they are

    also legitimately used as line delimiters and footnote markers.

    Line 1451 - Long line 129

    PG texts should have lines shorter than 76. There may be occasions

    where you decide that you really have to go out to 79 characters,

    but the sample above says that line 1451 is 129 characters long -

    probably two lines run together.

    Line 1590 - Short line?

    PG texts should have lines longer than 54 characters. However,

    there are special cases like poetry and tables of contents where

    the lines _should_ be shorter. So treat Gutcheck warnings about

    short lines carefully. Sometimes it's a genuine formatting

    problem; sometimes the line really needs to be short.

    Hint: gutcheck will not flag lines as short if they are indented

    - if they start with a space. I like to start inserted stanzas

    and other such items indented with a couple of spaces so that 

    they stand out from the main text anyway.

    Line 1804 - Begins with punctuation?

    Lines should normally not begin with commas, periods and so on.

    An exception is ellipses . . . which can happen at start of line.

    Line 1850 - Spaced em-dash?

    The PG standard for an em-dash--like these--is two minus signs

    with no spaces before or after them. Gutcheck flags non-PG

    em-dashes - like this one. Normally, you will replace it with a 

    PG-standard em-dash.

    Line 1904 - Query he/be error?

    Gutcheck makes a very minor effort to look for that scourge of all

    proofreaders, "be" replacing "he" or vice-versa, and draws your

    attention to it when it thinks it has found one.

    Line 2017 - Query digit in a1most

    The digit 1 is commonly OCRed for the letter l, the digit 0 for

    the letter O, and so on. When gutcheck sees a mix of digits and

    letters, it warns you. It may generate a false positive for

    something like 7am.

    Line 2083 - Query standalone 0

    In paranoid mode (see -x) only, gutcheck warns about the digit 0 

    and the number 1 standing alone as a word. This can happen if the 

    OCR misreads the words O or I.

    Line 2115 - Query word whetber

    If you have switched typo-checking on, gutcheck looks for

    potential typos, especially common h/b errors. It's not

    infallible; it sometimes queries legit words, but it's

    always worth taking a look.

    Line 2190 column 14 - Missing space?

    Omitting a space is a very common error,especially coming from

    OCRed text,and can be hard for a human to spot. The commas in

    the previous sentence illustrate the kind of thing I mean.

    Line 2240 column 48 - Spaced punctuation?

    The flip side of the "missing space" error , here , is when extra

    spaces are added before punctuation . Some old texts appear to add

    extra spaces around punctuation consistently, but this was a

    typographical convention rather than the author's intent, and the

    extra "spaces" should be removed when preparing a PG text.

    Line 2301 column 19 - Unspaced quotes?

    Another common spacing problem occurs in a phrase like "You wait

    there,"he said.

    Line 2385 column 27 - Wrongspaced quotes?

    As of version 0.98, gutcheck adds extra checks on whether a quote

    seems to be a start or end quote, and queries those that appear to

    be misplaced. This does give rise to false positives when quotes are

    nested, for example:

    "And how," she asked, "will your "friends" help you now?"

    but these false positives are worth it because of the many cases

    that this test catches, notably those like:

    "And how, "she said," will your friends help you now?"

    Sometimes a "wrongspaced quotes" query will arise because an earlier

    quote in the paragraph was omitted, so if the place specified seems

    to be OK, look back to see whether there's a problem in the preceding

    lines.

    Line 2400 - HTML Tag? <PRE>

    Some PG texts have been converted from HTML, and not all of the

    HTML tags have been removed.

    Line 2402 - HTML symbol? &emdash;

    Similarly, special HTML symbol characters can survive into PG

    texts. Can occasionally produce amusing false positives like

    . . . Marwick & Co were well known for it;

    Line 2540 - Mismatched quotes

    Another gutcheck mainstay - unclosed doublequotes in a paragraph.

    See the discussion of quotes in the switches section near the

    start of this file.

    Since the mismatch doesn't occur on any one line, gutcheck quotes

    the line number of the first blank line following the paragraph,

    since this is the point where it reconciles the count of quotes.

    However, if gutcheck is echoing lines, that is, you haven't used

    the -e switch, it will show the _first_ line of the paragraph, 

    to help you find the place without using line numbers. The 

    offending paragraph is therefore between the quoted line and 

    the line number given.

    Line 2587 - Mismatched single quotes

    Only checked with the -s switch, since checking single quotes is 

    not a very reliable process. Otherwise, the same logic as for 

    doublequotes applies.

    Line 2877 - Mismatched round brackets?

    Also curly and square brackets. Texts with a lot of brackets, like

    plays with bracketed stage instructions, may have mismatches.

    Line 3150 - No CR?

    Line 3204 - Two successive CRs?

    Line 3281 position 75 - CR without LF?

    These are the invalid line-end warnings. See the discussion of

    line-end checking in the switches section near the start of this

    file. If you see these, and your editor doesn't show anything

    wrong, you should probably try deleting the characters just before

    and after the line end, and the line-end itself, then retyping the

    characters and the line-end.

    Line 2940 - Paragraph starts with lower-case

    A common error in an e-text is for an extra blank line

    to be put in, like the blank line above, and this often

    shows up as a new paragraph beginning with lower case.

    Sometimes the blank line is deliberate, as when a 

    quotation is inserted in a speech. Use your judgement.

    Line 2987 - Extra period?

    An extra period. is a. common problem in OCRed text. and usually

    arises when a speck of dust on the page is mistaken for a period.

    or. as occasionally happens. when a comma loses its tail.

    Line 3012 column 12 - Double punctuation?

    Double punctuation., like that,, is a common typo and

    scanno. Some books have much legit double punctuation,

    like etc., etc., but it's worth checking anyway.

            *       *       *        *

For Windows-only users who are unfamiliar with DOS:

    If you're a Windows-only user, you need to save

    gutcheck.exe into the folder (directory) where the

    text file you want to check is. Let's say your

    text file is in C:\GUT, then you should save

    GUTCHECK.EXE into C:\GUT.

    Now get to a DOS prompt. You can do this by

    selecting the "Command Prompt" or "MS-DOS Prompt"

    option that will be somewhere on your

    Start/Programs menu.

    Now get into the C:\GUT directory. 

    You can do this using the CD (change directory) 

    command, like this:

        CD \GUT

    and your prompt will change to 

        C:\GUT>

    so you know you're in the right place.

    Now type

        gutcheck yourfile.txt

    and you'll see gutcheck's report

    By default, gutcheck prints its queries to screen.

    If you want to create a file of them, to edit

    against the text, you can use the greater-than

    sign (>) to tell it to output the report to a

    file. For example, if you want its report in a

    file called QUERIES.LST, you could type

        gutcheck yourfile.txt > queries.lst

    The queries.lst file will then contain the listing

    of possible formatting errors, and you can

    edit it alongside your text.

    Whatever you do, DON'T make the filename after

    the greater-than sign the name of a file already

    on your disk that you want to keep, because

    the greater-than sign will cause gutcheck to

    replace any existing file of that name.

    So, for example, if you have two Tolstoy files

    that you want to check, called WARPEACE.TXT and 

    ANNAK.TXT, make sure that neither of these names

    is ever used following the greater-than sign.

    To check these correctly, you might do:

    gutcheck warpeace.txt >war.lst

    and

    gutcheck annak.txt > annak.lst

    separately. Then you can look at war.lst and annak.lst

    to see the gutcheck reports.

            *       *       *        *

For existing 0.98 users upgrading to 0.99:

    If you run on old 16-bit DOS or Windows 3.x, I'm afraid

    you're out of luck. I'm not saying it _can't_ be compiled

    to run on 16-bit, but the executable with the package is

    for Win32 only. *nix users won't notice the change at all.

    There are two new switches: -u and -d. 

          See above for full rundown.

Here's a list of the new errors:

    Line 1456 - Carat character?

    I^ve found a few.

    Line 1821 - Forward slash?

    Common error for italicized "I", or so /'ve found.

    Line 2139 - Query missing paragraph break?

    "Come here, son." "Do I _have_ to go, dad?"

    Like that. False positives in some texts. Sorry 'bout that,

    but these are often errors.

    Line 2200 - Query had/bad error?

    Clear enough. Doesn't catch as many as I'd like it to,

    but rarely gives false alarms.

    Line 2268 - Query punctuation after the?

    Some words, like "the", very rarely have punctuation

    following them. Others, like "Mrs", usually have a

    period, but never a comma. Occasional false positives.

    Line 2380 - Query possible scanno arid

    It found one of your user-defined typos when you

    used the -u switch.

    Line 2511 - Capital "S"?

    Surprisingly common specific case, like: Jane'S 

    Line 3469 - endquote missing punctuation?

    OK. This one can really cause a lot of false positives

    in some books, but it switches itself off if it finds

    more than 20 in a text, unless you force it to list them

    all with the -v switch.

    "Hey, dad" Johnny said, "can we go now?"

    is a common punctuation-missing error.

    Line 4266 - Mismatched underscores?

    Like mismatched anything else!