May 14, 2026: Getting My Eyes Checked

I'm currently in the editorial dungeons preparing more Fighting Fantasy books for publication. One of the aspects that's crucial to me as the Line Editor of these American editions is getting the text as correct and polished as I can. With the older titles, this generally involves multiple sources and different scans, using optical character recognition software (OCR) to generate the text for me to review.

Because I'm usually dealing with two separate versions, this means I need to check both sources character by character, looking for discrepancies through my hyper-focused scrunched-up eyes. That way, I can ensure no issues were introduced into the final text we use because of imperfections in the scanned pages or hiccups in the OCR program.

Sometimes this method means I find some truly baffling bits.

Now, this isn't the exact text I found an issue in . . . I don't want to give away the excitement of what's on the horizon just yet. But it's comparable enough to the section I was working on that we could inflict the same problem here as an example.

So, what's wrong with this passage?

Feel free to give it a click.

Take your time; you're not making me wait . . . I wrote this days ago.

Give up?

Zoom and enhance . . .

Yes, that's a dot over the capital "I" in "If you want to continue northwards . . ."

No, it's not supposed to be there. I don't know why the OCR software added it. My theory? I think the computer was too literal with the notion of "making sure one's i's are dotted."

I've squashed many bugs like this before, and no doubt I'll do again in the future. But this specific quirk – one that was so weird it took me a solid five minutes to figure out what was wrong and fix it? It was unique . . . SO FAR dot dot dot . . .

-- Steven Marsh