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.
Sarah Van Oosterwijck Assistive Technology Trainer http://home.earthlink.net/~netentity
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.338 / Virus Database: 267.9.4/57 - Release Date: 7/22/2005