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

  • From: Mayrie ReNae <mrenae@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:37:05 -0800

Hi Eric!

You're awesome! You've got it all correct! Surround both page numbers and page breaks with blank lines. So, your pages will look like this:

Page break
Blank line
Page number
Blank line
Text on the page
Blank line
Next page break.

You are absolutely right, the concensus is that page numbers at the tops of pages makes navigation easier. Putting them at the tops of pages is not required, but many of us do move them there when they appear at the bottom.

Inserting asterisks to denote scene changes is just what many of us also do. It's terrific, and thoughtful.

Now, as for chapter headings. I'll try not to wax terribly verbose on this. When page numbers appear at the tops of all pages, your chapter headings will not be deleted. Though it may not be perfectly in accordance with the printed book, when just a numeral indicates a chapter heading, I add the word Chapter, as you stated. I do this so that an inexperienced validator won't accidentally think that a single character on a line is a scanning error and remove it.

If, for some reason, you have a book in which the page numbers appear at the bottoms of pages, and you do not feel inclined to move them, you can still protect the chapter heading from being stripped. Just insert the page number at the top of each page containing a chapter heading as well as leaving it at the bottom. Chapter headings need, also, to be surrounded by blank lines. A page containing a chapter heading should appear like this:

Page break
Blank line
Page number
Blank line
Chapter heading
Blank line
Text on the page
Blank line
Next page break.

When you treat chapter headings as I have described, the page numbers at the tops of the pages that you inserted to protect the chapter headings may well be stripped. That's okay, because the page number is as you left it at the bottom of the page, and your chapter heading will remain.

Just to be thorough, in case you choose not to move page numbers at the bottoms of pages, a page containing text and page number at the bottom should look like this:

Page break
Blank line
Text on the page
Blank line
Page number
Blank line
Next page break.

Sorry this was such a long note. Now that you've gotten through it, the short of it is that you have EXACTLY the right ideas about how to handle the things that you asked about. Carry on! And I just love to work with folks as conscientious, and careful as you are! Thank you!

Peace,
Mayrie

At 01:01 AM 1/18/2008, you wrote:
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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