That makes sense. I didn't realize the converter strips out the styles. At
least setting the styles, helped me avoid one letter per line in my
documents which made them highly annoying to proof. But I'm guessing those
aren't hard codes, so while the converter will strip out the style, it will
keep the paragraphs created by it intact. I've never heard otherwise at
least. :)
It certainly made files easier to proof after scanning them. I obviously
don't catch everything, but if I can't deal with one letter per line, and I
know that isn't how the book appears, it served its purpose. Thanks for
explaining more how the converter works.
--Katherine
From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Judy s.
Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2016 5:45 PM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: question about conversion process effect on
line breaks
Hi Katherine,
That's a great thought about using paragraph styles. However, the Bookshare
converter strips paragraph styles from documents, while maintaining actual
codes that tell Word (or the converter) where paragraphs end, where page
breaks are, and what is the bolding, italics and font size for each letter
in the document, etc., if that makes sense.
Because there are literally an infinite number of ways paragraph styles can
be set, a converter like Bookshare uses has to ignore the styles and look
for the "hard" codes (like paragraph marks, bolding, etc.) to translate Word
files into the consistent format that standardizes paragraphs and fonts and
the like. In a sense, Bookshare's converter has its own "master" paragraph
style that replaces any paragraph style that comes in to it.
It's tough for all of us volunteers when proofreading to figure out what are
"hard" codes and what aren't "hard" codes that Bookshare's converter will or
won't change when weird stuff shows up in a file. In this case, opting for
replacing the vertical tab makes sense to me as the way to tackle it. But
that's only because 1) I know that it's a "hard" code (and I know that
because I actually used those washing-machine-sized printers way back when
vertical tabs did something useful!) and 2) at the same time there isn't any
documentation from Bookshare that tells us what the converter is going to do
with it.
Judy s.
Follow me on Twitter at QuackersNCheese
<https://twitter.com/QuackersNCheese>
On 6/29/2016 5:44 PM, Katherine Petersen (Redacted sender katherine_petersen
for DMARC) wrote:
Hi There,
Judy can probably explain it better, since I think she's more of a word
expert than I am, but it's an option on the page layout tab that allows you
to set tabs and line spacing for a document. When you do this the paragraphs
are all in the same style throughout the text.
Sounds like the book has funky paragraph styling though, so this might not
help.
In a couple of books I scanned, I ended up with a letter on each line for a
couple pages and changing the paragraph styles got the text back to normal.
Best,
--Katherine
