Okay, I hear you. Still the text is there and I found it confusing. Regards, Kim Friedman. -----Original Message----- From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Evan Reese Sent: Monday, October 17, 2011 1:51 PM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Italics Hi Kim, Commendations on adding those accent marks, and resisting the urge to fix the misprints. I know that the temptation to do so can be nearly irresistible. I've encountered that temptation on many occasions, so I feel your pain when having to let those pass uncorrected. However, I was uncomfortable while reading your description of how you modified the text of the Scholz story. The author had his reasons for using, or not using, punctuation in a certain way. That was the style in which he chose to write the story. It is not up to us to help readers understand what the author intended, or alter the author's style because we think it will make it more readable, particularly when the alterations were based on "impressions", guesses, of what the author meant. It is our responsibility to preserve the author's style. Copy editing is not a part of the proofreading process. Most importantly, it is a violation of our volunteer agreement to alter the text. Evan ----- Original Message ----- From: Kim <mailto:kimfri11@xxxxxxxxxxx> Friedman To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Monday, October 17, 2011 7:48 AM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Italics Oh, thanks for telling me. Anyhow, the book I proofread was a SF anthology compiled in 1995. It's called New Legends and the authors are Greg Bear and Martin Harry Greenberg. If you can't get it from Bookshare, you might be able to find it somewhere. I'll tell you the book was very straightforward except for two stories called High Abyss by Gregory Benford and Radiance by Carter Scholz. Benford used greater-than signs to indicate the beginning of conversation and lesser-than signs for close quotations rather than the usual punctuation. This is challenging because some Braille displays can't deal with those marks, in particular, my device called the BrailleNote MPower would actually spell out "greater-than" "lesser-than" and that's awfully hard to read anytime you encounter it on the display because it takes up much too much space. Fortunately for me, the signs did show up (I haven't downloaded the book in its finished form to look at it on my display so I can't swear it will look the same). The story by Scholz had weird punctuation throughout. He'd use a whole lot of commas and dialog was indicated by a dash at the start of conversation and no marks whatsoever to indicate its close. There were no marks to indicate interrupted speech. I was concerned the reader might have a hard time with the story because of it. I couldn't use the usual way of indicating interrupted speech. If something modified a statement or thing and if I had the impression it was parenthetical, I surrounded the modified part with parentheses and used ellipses to indicate interrupted speech. I also put in accents for words like the A in Sao Paulo or the acute E in café. There were a couple of typos in this story and of course I couldn't fix them which bugged me no end. If I were reading this on my display, I think I would have been sort of confused by the story. Fortunately for me, I did write about this stuff to Carrie Karnos and of course I mentioned this in the comments section before I checked in the book. I don't know how sighted folks would have perceived this story, but I was really concerned about its readability for people using Braille devices. Regards, Kim Friedman. P.S.: I don't know if you'd mind, but I'd like to write you off list and you can write me if you like. Then we could write about off topic stuff which won't get us in trouble with the list. K. -----Original Message----- From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tim Syfert Sent: Monday, October 17, 2011 2:35 AM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Italics Thanks, Kim, but I am sighted and not eligible to download library books. Tim _____ From: Kim Friedman <kimfri11@xxxxxxxxxxx> To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Sunday, October 16, 2011 8:26 AM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Italics Hi, Tim, I saw those books you mentioned in the Bookshare collection. Congratulations. It's always a delight to see stuff you worked on ready for other people to read. It still is delightful to me. Incidentally, if you like SF, I just finished proofreading a SF anthology which is in the Bookshare collection. Boy, what a challenge that was. Regards from a fellow proofreader and wishing you much success, Kim Friedman. -----Original Message----- From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tim Syfert Sent: Sunday, October 16, 2011 2:57 AM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Italics Valerie, I am a proofreader. It was a formatting problem. Everything is okay now. Thanks. Tim _____ From: Valerie Maples <vlmaples@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Friday, October 14, 2011 9:13 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Italics What you are saying toggles everything on or off, style wise, Tim. You do not need to release it to download it again. Just go to your checked out book page and the last column after the books name is RTF and clicking it will start a new download. I still think it is probably either a formatting or scanner problem. Are you the scanner or the proofreader? I am a little confused by your wording. I will be gone all day tomorrow, but maybe Mayrie or someone else can walk you through possible problems and solutions... Valerie On Oct 14, 2011, at 2:27 PM, Tim Syfert wrote: Valerie, I highlighted the whole text and clicked on italics and the whole text became italics. I'm going to release the book and then download it again. I'm also going to read the manual. (grin) Tim _____ From: Valerie Maples <vlmaples@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Friday, October 14, 2011 12:51 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Italics It sounds like you might be pulling down regular in the font menus which removes all font formatting including italics. Hopefully it is easy like that. Another option could be your scanning software if you scan as plain text. Valerie On Oct 14, 2011, at 6:00 AM, Tim Syfert wrote: Hi Everyone, As proofreaders, we are suppose to keep all italics in the book, right? I have Word 2003 and when I set up a book for proofing, it takes all the italics out. Does anyone know what could be set wrong? It's a real pain to put them back in one page at a time. Thanks. Tim