[bksvol-discuss] Re: Proofreading Frustration

My problem does seem to be that there are many quotations on a single page. But it makes me wary that paragraphs haven't been preserved right because quotations are off. My trouble is that not all quotes stand by themselves. There could be a quote, then a description of what the other character is doing, then another quote by the original speaker. I don't know if I should separate those out so that the description of a person's action is in another paragraph or leave it the way it is. I just don't like forcing a line break when I'm unsure if that is how it is in the original book. I'm about a hundred pages from the end, a little over halfway done, and I've resolved to proofread the text as best I can, but really not sure what to do about the uncertain lack of line breaks. 

Andromache

On 5/6/2010 7:39 AM, Debby Franson wrote:

Hi Andromache!
I have noticed while proofing and scanning that quite often, where there are many short quotes on a page, the OCR makes a paragraph out of them, which can be confusing, though from context and careful reading while proofing, I believe I have been able to press enter where required to put each quotation on it's line so the reader can tell what character is saying what.
I was a bit confused while proofing my first book because I was using Word, which didn't put a blank line between paragraphs. I am not sure if this is your problem with the paragraph divisions or not, but, if you have something besides Word such as OpenBook or maybe Kurzweil, though I don't know what Kurzweil does, but if I load the rtf into OpenBook, there is a blank line between each paragraph while in edit mode.
I hope I have given you something useful to try. It can be hard to proofread without any kind of hard copy to check. 

Debby

At 03:48 AM 5/6/2010, Andromache wrote
I've checked out a book which is quite a good scan aside from dubious paragraph breaks. I know for prose, it's most efficient to only have new lines when there are blank spaces or at the beginnings of paragraphs, but this book seems to not have retained these properly. The way I know this is that quotations by different characters appear with no line break between, and some places where contextually, you'd think there should be a new paragraph, there isn't.
The difficulty arises because I'm a totally blind proofreader, and as far as I can tell, there isn't a Braille hard copy. This is where being able to comment on why a book is being released would be very helpful. *frustrated sigh* I was really hoping I could do it because the scan looked good, but I'm guessing I'll have to release it. Such a shame. 
Unless the list can suggest alternatives?

Andromache
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