[bksvol-discuss] Re: Page numbers and headers/footers

  • From: "Sarah Van Oosterwijck" <curiousentity@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 12:29:11 -0500

Thank you for your attention to our concerns and frustrations. Even knowing we are being heard and some attempt to resolve the issues will be made helps a lot.

I know perfection is not to be expected, but if everyone could have their own way, your summery of what we want is correct. Some people want every bit of formatting and information the original print book contains, and others would like the main text of the book and nothing else, so they are not needlessly bothered by things unimportant to them.



I am sure there are a few volunteers that would not be pleased to do any extra work to make the books more user-friendly, but it seems to me, from all I have read, that most people will do anything they can to make the books they work on better. If we volunteers could have the option of doing some kind of marking of the books so the processing and tagging would go better, then please give us that option.



We must have the option of seeing chapter titles and the original print page numbers in all formats. Many people may say that that information inconveniences them, but we don't make a habit of eliminating everything in society that inconveniences others, especially if those same items are necessary to other people. I find large parking lots and their driveways inconvenient when walking places, but I don't propose their elimination because I know they are needed by others. I also can still live and travel dispite their existence. I'm sure there are hundreds of examples like this that could illustrate my point.



Sarah Van Oosterwijck
Assistive Technology Trainer
http://home.earthlink.net/~netentity

----- 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:

* Take a bunch of text file formats as input, and get them to RTF
* Create an automated tool to turn the RTF into a single XML file
* Use that single source file to create a DAISY book, and a BRF
book
* Capture page tags and page numbers correctly
* 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:

* On the input side, correct print page numbering captured in all
of our books
* 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 <http://www.benetech.org/>

The Benetech Initiative - Technology Serving Humanity
Benetech is a nonprofit organization




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