After two weeks of procrastination, I finally sat down and got my Elance.com profile up and running on my account. The number of projects for editing and proofreading is fairly low, especially when considering how many service providers there are for that subcategory. It seems that the number of open bidding sessions is around twenty, maybe less.

For now, I am on the free plan where there are only three connections (basic bids) per month. The next upgrade would be to spend $10/month for a total of 15 connections. Additional connections can be purchased in lots of ten for an additional $5. Any unused connections at the end of the 30-day billing cycle cannot be used for the succeeding month.

So, there was a copyediting gig of around 5700 words (20 pages) on which I bid. All told, there are over 30 total bidders for that small project. There’s a better project for copyediting two DOC files and combining the two onto a PDF. The writer says that they were less than 50 pages each, when in fact the first DOC was 66 pages in length after the ToC was stripped. Apparently, rarely should an editor take the buyers at their word without question because they **KNOW** how long their documents are. OTOH, I didn’t download the second DOC yet. Maybe it’s less than 50 pages. Right!

This Nuance (formerly ScanSoft) PDF Professional 4 package will not properly activate when running under Windows Vista—unless a slight change is made to Vista. The Data Execution Prevention (DEP) security feature in Vista is incompatible with some (or all) of the executables in PDF Converter Professional 4

Fortunately, the Vista system feature can be turned off for selective applications. To turn this feature off for all of the executables in PDF Converter Professional 4, follow the instructions in this tutorial. The technical support at Nuance must surely be running a scam in that their knowledge base makes no mention of this simple workaround to their buggy software when run on Vista. This same bug workaround will also work on some other of Nuance’s newer software when it fails to run properly on Vista.

Furthermore, they charge $9.95 per technical support session via phone or email, except for the first session. It’s quite obvious that this bug may not be noticed right away. So, if a user calls technical support for this problem after the free session, he will surely get screwed by this devious firm. In fact, the call will probably be worthless because other blogs have mentioned that they still had this problem, even after paying Nuance tech support.

Anyway, the PDF Converter Professional 4 now runs most of the part–a big improvement over its previous condition of not working at all.

One major area of incompatibility with OOo Writer and MS Word is converting a Writer frame (usually enclosing a picture and a caption) to Word. What happens is that the caption’s formatting may have its indentation altered.

Such a OOo Writer frame with an enclosed caption appears as below:

After converted by OOo Writer to the MS Word 2003 DOC format, it appears in MS Word as the following:

Obviously, the figure caption’s formatting has been altered after the conversion.

A workaround for this would be to use a two-row table in OOO Writer–placing the graphic (picture, in OOo Writer terminology) in the first row and the figure caption in the second row. If a different number of graphics or a different arrangement is desired, then modify the table dimensions appropriately.

There are a number of incompatibilities between Writer and Word that show up after one is converted to the other. Most conversions to/from Writer and Word are seemingly flawless, whereas some conversions are horribly botched.

The “current” OOoAuthors Migration Guide was originally written for version 1 of OOo Writer and MS Word 2003 and, therefore, is now terribly out-of-date. Because no writer or other editor at OOo is apparently addressing this issue of incompatibilities, I will take upon myself the gathering of items of incompatibilities between Writer and Word.

As any inconsistencies between Writer and Word are noticed, they will be listed in this blog under the category–Migration Guide. These items will then be considered later when thoroughly rewriting the OOoAuthors Migration Guide.

(1) Copyedited. (2) As with Chapter 3, an index was appended to the back so that the indexing could be checked. There were two upper/lowercase errors. (3) Numerous character style changes made. (4) Some minor technical errors.

This chapter should be ready to publish.

As in Chapter 3, an alphabetical chapter index was appended to the back of this chapter. This allows a checking of the index entries before the omnibus book index is constructed. There were two indexing errors that were detected at this editing level. When a book is made from the chapter subdocuments, the current front stuff isn’t used anyway. So adding an index does no harm and only helps the overall technical editing process for whenever a book is published.

This firm–EditFast–claims to have over 1200 editors, proofreaders, and indexers in its stable. Its owner–Robert Kidd–has a very brief public Linked-In profile. Robert appears to be **VERY** selective in his Linked-In connections because as of this date, 2 March 2008, he still doesn’t have any!

Conducting a Google search with the keywords being EditFast complaint or EditFast scam, the following hits to various forums or Web sites were found:
AbsoluteWrite.com forums
WritersWeekly.com forums
Work from Home Guide.net
HTML Forums.com

My gut reaction is that this firm is in fierce competition with other businesses (probably in Asia, where China, the Philippines, and India have far more English speakers than does the US), and EditFast most certainly does not have anywhere near enough work to keep its 1200 or 1300 editors, proofreaders, or indexers gainfully employed. So, any editor paying for extra exposure at EditFast would appear to be wasting his money.

But, perhaps, I might be wrong. Maybe someday I might come across somebody who actually worked with this firm–for fun or profit…

If you ever harbor any doubts whether a business is legit or an ongoing concern, one way to quickly discover if anybody had bad dealings with the concern would be to conduct a simple Web search. You could Google such entries as the firm’s name followed by one or both of the words “complaint” or “scam” and after a few hits, you should get a general idea of what the company is about.

Another means might be reading a Better Business Bureau or some such check online. But the Web-search approach to me seems better because it is usually far more informative and less formal. If most or all of the testimonials or remarks on reputable weblogs, forums, or Web sites are negative concerning a certain business (or business plan), then a safe course of action would be not to do business with it, especially if there are other businesses that are generally accepted as being honest.

In the near future, I plan to run a few such quick checks on firms that purport to have work or gigs for freelance editors (and writers). In the past, I came across some that seemed to stretch the truth a bit or had contradictory or suspicious statements in their Linked-in profiles and their Web sites. Perhaps, other satisfied or disgruntled individuals may offer their own comments on those firms (or possibly another).

I will  post the checks of such firms in The good, the bad, and the ugly category and include links of others who either had dealings with the firms or have their own doubts without too terribly many editorials of my part. In other words, I’ll let others make their own observations or judgments in the various weblogs, forums, and Web sites. However, as is my wont, I may throw in a snide or snarky remark or comment along the way…

(1) Copyedited.

(2) Footnotes need to be repaired. They initially were all set to #1 and still are. Is this a bug with my version or not???

(3) Some of the subgraphics were not properly aligned in some figures. These should be rechecked. One figure has two #1 subgraphics instead of #1 and #2.

(4) Several minor technical errors fixed. Some disagreements with the GUI names were corrected.

This WordPress weblog deals primarily with technical editing and writing, plus related topics. Topics include technical documentation, open-source and proprietary software, copyediting (including proofreading), miscellaneous editing topics (layout, indexing, etc.), and occasional rants and raves.