On Nov 25, I listed the global editing left to do (except for the first step, which was done):
- sweep through the index—standardizing entries, adding new ones, making sure that entries pointed to all relevant parts of book.
- sweep through figures—checking size, positioning, and (where relevant) figure credits
- check coherence of lab instructions for each lab. Some specific point editing may have left inconsistencies.
- sweep through full text looking for important sentences or paragraphs that need to be highlighted with “important” boxes. (I started adding the boxes last year, but I have not done a sweep of the whole book looking for where they are needed.)
- check for overfull hboxes (bad line breaking)
- check for widow and orphan lines (bad page breaking)
- spell check all files.
I thought that I might be able to power through the editing and be done by Nov 30.But here it is Dec 7, and I’m less than half way through doing the “important-box” sweep (250 out of 534 pages done). I have gotten the figure credits done, and I’ve fixed most of the figures in the first 250 pages.
I also redid a couple of figures—one was using old Bitscope-generated data, when I could now get much more and much cleaner data with the Analog Discovery 2. The other one I fixed was a fairly recent one showing ringing in a Schmitt trigger inverter that had capacitive feedback—I made it clearer by increasing the feedback capacitance to make the ringing last longer.
I also cleaned up the instructions for the thermistor lab and the hysteresis lab.
Because I feel I need to release some version of the book next week for the BME 51A class, I’m probably going to end up doing two releases—one next week and one the first week of January. I’d like to get at least the important-box sweep and spell check done through page 354 (the end of BME 51A), which I should be able to manage before next week’s release.
There are still 10 overfull hboxes (1 in a chapter title, 4 in the reference list, and 5 in the index), with the worst overfull boxes in the reference list. The problem is partly with the inflexible spacing of bibliography entries and partly with hard-to-break urls. Since the worst of them is only 17 points too wide, I may not bother fixing them.
I’ve not even looked to see whether there are widow and orphan lines—though I have set the penalties for them high and set \raggedbottom, so LaTeX should avoid making them.
I’ve not done any spell checks yet—I’ll start that after I’ve made any more major modifications through page 354. I did spot and fix a few typos while doing the sweep for important boxes.
