Hi Evan and everyone, In several books I've read since the new site went live, I've found sentences where the period at the end of the sentence is missing. Also, often, a dash is followed by a space instead of a letter. I've found that JAWS reads such occurrences without a problem, but they are very noticeable when using Text Aloud. I have not looked at any BRF files, but these problems have appeared in many DAISY files. This is true even in the outsourced books. This situation is unfortunate, and I certainly hope a fix can be found. *smile* Blessings. Lynn I ----- Original Message ----- From: EVAN REESE To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Sunday, July 05, 2009 8:25 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Need Help to Confirm Bug In Bookshare Tools Hello All, Lissi and I have discovered that in one recent book we did, errors were introduced by the Bookshare processing that were not in the original rtf submission. These errors take the form of words being split, often in strange places--that is, not between syllables. I was checking the quality of a recent book we did and discovered that the word "girl" appeared in one place as "gi rl", and the word "will" appeared as "w ill". That was in just the first few pages. It seems likely that more of these will appear if I keep reading. We checked Lissi's proofread rtf file, and neither of these errors were there. I had seen this odd word splitting in some other books, some of which I was thinking of rescanning, and just assumed they were scannoes that were not noticed by the proofreader. (I'm sure that many of you know that lots of books get into the collection without a REAL proofreading, even now.) It never occurred to me until today that these errors would come from Bookshare's tools. It was a bit of a shock, in fact. Lissi did mention that when she has clicked on the link for misspellings when checking in a book, she has sometimes seen letter groupings tagged as errors that she was not able to find in the rtf file, so she was unable to correct them. When she was not able to find the misspellings in the file, she ignored them, figuring that Bookshare was just wrong. That is not as strange a position to take is it may sound, since Bookshare cannot even give a consistent word count on the submission form! I use brf files, but if these errors are being introduced before braille translation, then they would probably appear in the Daisy version of the book as well. We plan to check some of our other books to see how prevalent this problem is, but we can at least say for certain that the Bookshare tools introduced errors in at least this book that were not in the file that was checked back in after proofreading. It seems very unlikely that this particular book would be unique. If this happened to this book, then it is likely happening to others. That's what we want your help with. We would be very grateful if some of you out there would be willing to check a proofreading or two of your own and see if this problem exists in those books. I think it would be best to check proofreading's, not submissions, to eliminate the possibility of errors that might have crept in between submission and proofreading. I know this may take a bit of time, since not only do you need to find any split words, but then you need to compare the Bookshare version with the original rtf file so that it can be shown that those errors are not in the file that was checked back in to Bookshare. It is probably best to check the most recent proofreading's to ensure that any problems you discover were not the result of tools that have been superseded. The book we found these split words in was added to the collection on June 18. On the other hand, I don't think that huge numbers of examples need to be found in each book. If just a few examples are identified in several recently added books, that should be enough evidence to prove that the Bookshare tools are adding these errors. Maybe, if a few more people can confirm this, we can get it looked into. Thanks a lot for any help in this investigation. It's a little disappointing to think that those of us who do our very best to get the highest quality books into the collection might be having our work degraded by a software glitch of some kind. We're hoping to get some confirmation of this particular glitch so we can quash it as soon as possible to ensure the best reading experience for readers. I know most of you here agree on that, otherwise you probably wouldn't be subscribed. Thanks again for helping us check into this if you can. Evan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.375 / Virus Database: 270.13.5/2219 - Release Date: 07/05/09 05:53:00