[bksvol-discuss] Re: Page numbers and headers/footers
- From: "Deborah Kent Stein" <dkent5817@xxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 17:40:28 -0500
Message
Dear Jim,
I really appreciate your thoughtful responses to our concerns on this list. I
realize that you are enormously busy with Bookshare and other Benetech
projects, and thank
you for taking the time to communicate with us directly.
About the stripper - yes, if the perfect technology were out there, it would
be ideal to have headers and footers (including page numbers and chapter
headings) retained in Daisy and BRF files, and to create an option which would
allow Bookshare users to remove this information if they choose to do so.
Clearly, some readers find headers and footers to be annoying, while others
consider this material important or essential.
At present, however, this ideal technological tool does not exist, and it
may not be available any time soon. In the meantime, could Bookshare stop
using the stripper? It seems to me it would not be a matter of cost, as we're
talking about NOT doing something rather than adding additional steps. As
several of us pointed out during the Bookshare meeting at NFB convention, once
information has been stripped from a Bookshare file it is gone, and if someone
wants it, they're out of luck. Until we have a way to create options
technologically, I urge Bookshare to create them by preserving as much as
possible of the material that is in the original print book for both Daisy and
BRF readers.
In an earlier post I raised the idea of developing a means for Bookshare
volunteers and users to have direct input into policymaking. Could we think
about how this might be implemented? Also, I would like to suggest that
Bookshare work to include blind and print-disabled persons on its staff and
board of directors - people who have a lifelong understanding of the needs of
the community which Bookshare is designed to serve.
Bookshare is awesome! We all want to see it grow and thrive - on that we're
in complete agreement!
Debbie
----- Original Message -----
From: Jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2005 1:05 AM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Page numbers and headers/footers
Hey, I promised my next post would be on this topic. Here it is!
Let's talk about the objectives we had in creating today's workflow:
a.. Take a bunch of text file formats as input, and get them to RTF
b.. Create an automated tool to turn the RTF into a single XML file
c.. Use that single source file to create a DAISY book, and a BRF book
d.. Capture page tags and page numbers correctly
e.. Hopefully capture chapter tags
We weren't able to automatically get chapter tags four years ago, and haven't
been able to put much effort into it since. As many of you know, we surveyed
our users some time back and got a lot of feedback (more than half of our users
at that time responded) that improving quality was a big deal. We've been
trying to upgrade all Fair quality books, and focusing more on high quality
content. We've also moved away from accepting books without pages, since we
regard page numbers as the minimum navigation requirement to meet basic quality
standards.
Rather than getting into the deep discussion of whys and wherefores, let me
test out an ideal solution to make sure I know what people would want:
a.. On the input side, correct print page numbering captured in all of our
books
b.. On the output side, the ability to have these print page numbers and
headers and footers accessible in either DAISY or BRF formats: people who don't
want them don't see them, and people who do want them do see them
If this worked perfectly, would people be happy? By making sure we're clear
on the ideal solution, we can go back to how we're missing and how to get
closer to the ideal than we are doing today. The timing is good, because we're
designing Bookshare.org's first overhaul, and we need to know where we're
going. We already know that we're likely to get a much different input stream
three years from now than we did in the past three years, so the input
processing workflow is definitely getting revisited.
Jim Fruchterman
President and CEO
Benetech
480 California Avenue, Suite 201
Palo Alto, California 94306 USA
+1 650 475-5440 extension 106
Fax: +1 650 475-1066
jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx
www.benetech.org
The Benetech Initiative - Technology Serving Humanity
Benetech is a nonprofit organization
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