[bksvol-discuss] Page Numbers, Chapter Headings and Scene Breaks

  • From: "BlindGeek" <yakkoman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:01:07 -0800

Hi.  My name's Eric Troup.  Some of you may remember me because I used to 
frequent the Bookshare mailing list.

I've been looking over the submission guidelines for volunteers and have a 
couple questions.

First, regarding page numbers: I understand that we have to keep the page 
numbers sequential to match the book.  I assume, therefore, that although 
headers ought to be removed (page headrs, I mean), the page number itself 
should remain.  Is this correct?  Furthermore, if the book has page numbers on 
the bottom of each page, oughtn't we put them at the top instead, for ease of 
reference?

And while on the subject of pages, when I look at a .rtf document using 
Wordpad, there's only a line break between the end of one page and the 
beginning of another.  No real page break at all.  (I currently don't have 
Microsoft Word, but if memory serves, it did in fact let you know when you 
moved onto a new page of an .rtf file.)  Should we be putting a blank line 
above and below the page number at the top of a page?

My next question concerns chapter headings.  Once, I had occasion to read the 
copy of a book I'd submitted after it'd been posted to Bookshare, and found to 
my slight annoyance that the chapter headings were missing.  Now, in this book, 
the chapter heading consisted of a number.  That's it.  Just a line with a 1 or 
2 or what-have-you.  Those lines were, apparently, being deleted automatically 
because I made sure I put them in.  (The book as scanned had no headings at all 
either, but I know having read other books in the same series with an Optacon 
that the chapter number is there, it's just enclosed in a graphic which the OCR 
software can't usually read.  In my recent submissions, I solved this problem 
thusly: if the chapter heading was "1," I'd write "Chapter 1" in its place.  If 
the heading was "One," I'd wrie "Chapter One" instead.  Should I stop doing 
this?  Is that considered editing an author's work?

My final question involves scene breaks which are normally designated with a 
double-space in printed material.  Reading Bookshare books, I've sometimes 
found it jarring, trying to figure out what's going on.  Obvoiusly, context 
usually shows me that a new scene has started, but sometimes that takes a 
paragraph or two, particularly if the previous scene ended with dialogue and 
the new scene begins with dialogue.  I noticed that in printed works, when a 
scene ends at the end of a page, the scene is shown to be ending with three 
asterisks on an otherwise blank line ("* * *").  So, I took it upon myself to 
simply insert these asterisks into a book where there was normally a 
double-space between scenes.  I find that, for myself, this makes the 
experience of reading a book with a speech synthesizer much easier, since I 
don't have to distract myself from the story long enough to figure out why what 
I'm reading doesn't make much sense.  Similar to my question about chapter 
headings, is my inserting the asterisks considered editing the author's work?  
Should I stop doing this in my Bookshare submissions?

Thanks.

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