Building a Style Sheet 12: Checks to Include

Video transcript

This is part 12 of our video series on building a PerfectIt style sheet. This video looks at the Checks to Include tab.

This tab is primarily for designing a simplified style for your colleagues.

So let’s say we have two styles:

- My Style

- Style for Colleagues

I’ll choose the one for colleagues, then click Edit.

The Checks to Include tab allows you to choose:

- What checks are included; and

- Whether the style includes consistency checking or just style preferences.

Let’s break that down with some examples.

Let’s say you decide that the check of Missing Table, Box, and Figure Titles is too complicated to be part of a style for colleagues. So you click that check. Then you can choose “Do not check”.

Note: That’s different to the Choose Checks button at the beginning of PerfectIt. Choices here are built into the style. If you turn off a check here, it will be completely hidden from users of this style (so it won’t be visible in Choose Checks or the drop-down menu).

That’s how you can turn off a check. But how about turning off just the consistency element of a check?

First: The theory. Lots of PerfectIt’s checks produce results that can be confusing for non-professionals. For example, in PerfectIt’s check of hyphenation consistency, users need to look for false positives such as whether a phrase is a noun in one place, but a compound adjective in another. Since that’s too complicated for some users, the idea here is that editors can use PerfectIt in its default mode, but create a style for others that simplifies things.

To see that, click Hyphenation of Phrases, then choose “Only find style preferences”. For that check, PerfectIt will no longer check consistency. However, it will search your style rules. You can go through each check and set PerfectIt to work at the level that will be right for your colleagues.

That completes our look at the Checks to Include tab. However, if you’re preparing a style for colleagues, the next video in this series will help take your style from good to great!