I know of something that is being done that's stripping page numbers and
sometimes chapter headings from submitted books as well. Some
volunteers,
mostly not on the list, have begun using Kurzweil's feature to strip
headers automatically. While it does remove the annoying header at the
top
of the page, it also removes the page numbers as well. I don't think
this is
being done with any malice or any realization of how difficult
proofreading
these books can be. It just seems like a handy shortcut. The text of the
books is clean and easy to read. Right now, Bookshare still hasn't
officially required page numbers, so it's a touchy subject. I have
politely
asked two volunteers to use another method and was told that page
numbers
are annoying and that the people don't want to hear them while reading.
In
both cases, there were missing pages, and I had to go and buy the novel
because there was no way to get these people to scan the pages I needed
since their print page numbers and my number of page breaks didn't
agree.
This is a very gray area for me. The only solution I've thought of is to
put
in numbers by hand, but that's a guessing game since there's not a good
way
to tell what the page number is for the first page of core content. It
may
be page 1 in some books but is different in other books. It's usually
page 7
in the Harlequin and Steeplehill romances and page 5 in the Berkley
Prime
Crime series. Without official backing from Bookshare, I don't feel
comfortable with either rejecting a book with clear text with no page
numbers or continuing to ask that the submitter stop using the Kurzweil
header feature.
I'm a literalist when it comes to Bookshare's instructions, and the
manual
is pretty clear about page breaks being required but page numbers being
optional. This is because some books do not come with page numbers, and
I
respect that. The manual does ask proofreaders not to remove page
numbers if
present, but it doesn't give any direct guidelines for proofreaders
about
handling books with the page numbers stripped. It also does not strongly
advise submitters to refrain from using automatic stripping tools that
remove page numbers. I don't think it's right for me to hold a person to
a
higher standard than what is required by Bookshare. I don't like the
situation though. It makes it much harder to spot missing pages,
duplicate
pages, and unnumbered pages containing ads or photos in the center of a
book. I know this causes confusion for Carrie as well since she can't
spot
missing pages either.
Hmm. Since they're writing a new version of Kurzweil, maybe we would
have
better luck with asking them to write a page number protector so that
people
could strip headers without losing page numbers. Is anyone on the
Kurzweil
list or know of someone to approach at Kurzweil where that feature could
be
requested? Or maybe they could add a "number pages sequentially" feature
where you could mark page 1, and the program could insert actual page
numbers just after each page break until the end of the file. It would
take
the define operator page numbers feature a step further and could be a
separate menu item so the define operator page number feature would
still
work as usual. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would make life easier
when
you have to manually number a 500 page book. What do you all think? Is
it
worth asking?
Monica Willyard
"The best way to predict the future is to create it." -- Peter Drucker
-----Original Message-----
From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of E.
Sent: Sunday, April 19, 2009 2:03 AM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] request to submitters
I have recently validated several books all of which had lots of junk
characters, no page numbers whatsoever or both.
If submitters are doing something which removes page numbers along
with running headers and footers please do you best to find out how
to retain the page numbers.
Also please watch out for the following junk characters. For some
reason I am finding more of them in submits lately.
You need punctuation turned on to read the next few junk character
examples.
They are
~ ^ tab character * | \
I know it seems these characters can easily be removed. Sometimes
what seems easy is harder than you think in reality so if you can
prevent them from getting into your submits please help out.
You may want to use rank spelling on a page or two of text to find
out how it is scanning.
Thanks for being understanding.
Elizabeth
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