APF Chapter 6: Editorial Comments

People who write articles to the Pratchett newsgroups or who email me annotations should always be aware of one thing: for the APF I will freely quote and copy from your submissions, without further explicit permission or credit.

It's not only that I think long lists of contributors' names would be a bother to maintain (we're talking about many hundreds of names here), would make the APF even larger than it already is, and would be completely uninteresting to anybody except the contributors themselves; but doing it my way also allows me to edit, change, and mutilate the texts as I see fit without worrying about folks going: "but that's not what I said!".

Explicitly marked quotes (i.e. the material placed between quotation marks and preceded by a source attribution) form the exception to this rule. In particular when including quotes from Terry Pratchett himself, I will choose a selection in the first place, fix typos or obvious syntactical mistakes, and adapt punctuation to conform to the rest of the APF, but I will make no further edits or changes. In other words: What You See Is What He Said.

Apart from all the folks who contributed annotations, there are heaps of people who have gone out of their way to help me get the APF into its current form, and thanking them is certainly something that I don't mind spending a few paragraphs on.

First and foremost, I have to thank Mike Kew, my Assistant Editor, who came aboard in 2000 and basically did the hardest and most thankless bits of work for the various 7a.5.x releases. His efforts kept the APF going in its darkest hours, and without him v9.0 would not yet have seen the light of day.

I would also like to thank all the APF proofreaders, beta-testers and fact-checkers (by now again too many to list separately), who have helped exterminate typos and grammar errors while improving quote and page number accuracy. It's mindnumbingly boring work, and you have no idea how much I appreciate not having to do it all by myself.

There are a number of people who have been so instrumental over the years I would like to mention and thank them individually:

Nathan Torkington and Andy "&." Holyer, for being there at the beginning and helping to get the whole thing rolling.

Sander Plomp, for the logs of early alt.fan.pratchett newsgroup traffic, and for coming up with the idea of making a LaTeX version of the APF.

Robert Collier, for his work on the original HTML version of the APF.

Paulius Stepanas, for his help with the double page numbers. I once promised that the "conversion function" would be a part of APF v9.0 -- but it was not to be, and I apologise...

Trent Fisher and David Jones, for helping me out in the beginning with Perl and LaTeX programming, respectively.

Last, but not least: Terry Pratchett, for giving us something to annotate in the first place; for giving me permission to use quotes from his articles in the APF; and for having to put up with increasing numbers of fans who, perhaps because of the APF, have begun to think he is incapable of writing anything truly original. They should know better.

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