Evan, some of the problems I noted with brf files definitely occurred consistently within sections of italicized text. Good investigating on your part!
Judy s. EVAN REESE wrote:
No, they don't know about it because nobody has mentioned it yet, and I have only just posted about it because I just learned of it. I'm still investigating some other books, and so I'm not prepared to say how extensive the problem is. One possibility is that it may only occur under certain circumstances, such as extended passages of italicized text, which is where we definitely confirmed the two instances I posted about. It may not occur anywhere else. I haven't had a chance to check that much yet. So it may not be as bad as all that. The passages in the other books where I saw this problem did not have italics, but until fairly recently, italics in braille didn't show up, so the passages might have been italicized and I wouldn't know it. But I wanted to ask some others if they would mind checking a few recent proofreadings of their own to see if the problem shows up there. If it does, then we can make note of where it occurs, and perhaps of where it doesn't to try to get a handle on what is going on. If it only occurs, say in passages of extended italics, then it is still something that it would be nice to fix, but not nearly as big a problem as it would be if it is occurring in other places. I just want to try to find out. Evan----- Original Message ----- *From:* Kim Friedman <mailto:kimfri11@xxxxxxxxxxx> *To:* bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> *Sent:* Sunday, July 05, 2009 9:46 PM *Subject:* [bksvol-discuss] Re: Need Help to Confirm Bug In Bookshare Tools Hi, Evan, Kim here. That's awful! To me, it seems rotten if the Bookshare tools are in effect sabotaging the work of scanners and proofreaders. Do the folks at Bookshare know about this? They reallyshould. Regards and best of luck, Kim aka Ellinder.------------------------------------------------------------------------ *From:* bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *EVAN REESE *Sent:* Sunday, July 05, 2009 6:26 PM *To:* bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx *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, errorswere 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 formisspellings 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 beforebraille 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 thisproblem 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 ifsome 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 littledisappointing 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
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