FITS 4.0 language-editing summary

Language editing of the FITS Standard 4.0 document approved in July 2016 has been (slowly) conducted by Malcolm Currie and Lucio Chiappetti, and the edited version (25 June 2018) ready for approval was submitted to IAUFWG for comments, and now (20 July 2018) a very last final version is ready for voting. Effective 13 August 2018 such version has been approved by the IAU DRWG FITS SEG and therefore is the only valid version of the FITS Standard.

The approved 4.0 Standard is here while the final version submitted for vote is here and the version originally submitted for comments is here

Language editing does not imply any change to the technical content of the Standard, which has already been approved.

A summary of the edits is given in Appendix H.4 in the edited document itself.

We present here some basic information to get an idea of the editing done. If you want more detail please look at this more detailed account, which also provides some details on the various steps during editing. In particular such web page provides also the difference files for the work done between Jun 25 and Jul 20. The final valid version and the Jul 20 version submitted for voting are identical, except that the colour-code highlighting and the draft markers have been removed in the final valid version,

If you want the ultimate level of detail look at the latexdiff output or at the difference between the LaTeX sources.

Latexdiff output: latexdiff is a program which compares two LaTeX documents and produces a third highlighting the differences. In the form shown red indicates the old version (changed or deleted) and blue indicates the new version (changed or added). Here is the output in various formats, PostScript and PDF. Note formatting of latexdiff is not always perfect. For more detail see the more detailed account. Also in some cases the Postscript (.ps) diff is complete, while the PDF diff is not (if generated with psd2pdf might be truncated, if generated with pdflatex might be missing the ToC and cross-references since it should be run twice and the second run takes ages).

In case of doubts compare the actual document PDF or the latex sources, which are here:

Item 2016 approved standardLanguage edited version Approved version
LaTeX sourcefits_standard40aa.tex fits_standard40aa-last.tex fits_standard40aa-le.tex
PDF documentfits_standard40aa.pdf fits_standard40aa-last.pdf fits_standard40aa-le.pdf

The edits have been applied to the entire LaTeX source with the only exception of C-code comments (unchanged).

In addition to the real language-edits, the language-edited version includes also:

Note that the temporary colour coding used to highlight the latter two edit groups (blue), as well as the non-prescriptive parts of the approved draft standard which were never formally voted upon (magenta) i.e. some sentences in section 1.2 and Tables 1 and 2 and Appendix A, may conflict with the latexdiff colour coding.

For the rest the edits are summarized in Appendix H.4, and listed in more detail separately. They include consistent word capitalization, hyphenation, punctuation (particularly commas), small numnbers in letters, minor rewording, consistent use of italics and typewriter fonts, as well as some edits which are not necessarily apparent in the printed version, but involve consistent use of LaTeX macros (for instance to indicate keyword names and values, or RFC 2119 shall, should, etc. obligations). For the latter the preamble of the LaTeX source contains (as LaTeX comments) a "guide for future authors".

sax.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/FITS/Conventions/languageediting.html :: original creation 2018 ago 13 12:30:42 CEST :: last edit 2018 Aug 13 12:30:42 CEST