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KB0317: How can Jutoh help me with proofreading and editing?

Although you can use Jutoh as a conversion tool to get from a word processor document to an ebook, and to format content, it can do a lot more than that. You can write a book from scratch in Jutoh, and you can use a number of tools and features to help perfect the content of your manuscript. Here are some suggestions.

  1. Use the spellchecker (Book | Check Spelling or F12).

  2. Use the Formatting Cleanup command on the Format | Book menu, and use options such as Remove spaces at the start and end of paragraphs, and Replace straight quotation marks.

  3. Use the Find and Replace dialog to do further cleanup, such as replacing two spaces with a single space. You can use the presets facility to store frequently-used searches.

  4. Create a text document for your editing notes by clicking on Documents on the toolbar and then on Add Text Document. This will be added under Scraps in your project, and won't appear in your finished ebook. You can show the notes next to your book chapters by dragging the document tab to the right-hand side of the Jutoh window - the tabs will be split. If you have a lot of document tabs in Jutoh and would like to clean them up without closing your notes window, right-click over the tab and check Sticky. Then you can right click over a chapter tab and clear other tabs.

  5. Use custom checking in the Jutoh manual (a Jutoh Plus feature) to find all sorts of problems in your manuscripts. It can find repeated words, missing quotation marks, missing punctuation at the end of paragraphs, clichés, often-used capitalisation mistakes or incorrect usage, and generally help you conform to your own guidelines. As you proofread a manuscript, you can add more presets that will uncover the same mistake later in the document or in other books. You may end up finding hundreds of mistakes that are easy for a human to miss. This is an incredibly powerful feature!

  6. If you have made edits to a document, you might want to mark the text so a proofreader can go through the changes. A convenient way of doing this is to set up a custom shortcut that inserts a keyword such as *EDIT* that can be searched for by the proofreader. To add the shortcut, click Customise Shortcuts on the View menu. Then click Edit Shortcuts, and in the shortcuts editor dialog, click Add. Type a name, such as "Edit Mark", and in Symbol, type *EDIT* (or similar text). Check Primary shortcut, and choose a suitable shortcut such as Alt+1. Click OK, then Close. Your keyboard shortcut will now insert the keyword at the current editor position. This is a global setting, not project-specific, and will persist between Jutoh sessions.

  7. You can add comments in the text that won't appear in the finished ebook (unless you configure Jutoh to do so via the configuration option Comments to include). Select some text, and in the Objects tab, click comment, or use the menu command Format | Insert | Comment (Ctrl+;). Optionally add tags for searching via the Inspector, and the comment text. Now go to the Inspector tab and ensure it's searching in all documents by clicking on "..." and then All Documents. You will see all the comments in the project, and you can search, for example for the initials of the comment author.

  8. If you have a large and complex books with many subsections, you may find it helpful to view the book hierarchy, which may be different from the way you have structured the project in the Organizer. Click on the Inspector tab and choose Outline: it will show headings as defined by Format | Book | Build Table of Contents, and you can navigate to different parts of your book using this hierarchy. To show it alongside other formatting palette tools, drag the tab to the top, bottom, left or right edge of the formatting palette.


Contents | Start | End | Previous: KB0316: How do I add a chapter or other book section? | Next: KB0318: Why does Jutoh show 'XML parsing error' when trying to import an ODT file?