Judy,
I haven't done anything that long, but for the non-fiction books that I
did, my process was not much different than yours. As the years have
gone by, the OCR programs have become much better at things like
recognizing tiny footnote numbers. So my best advice for scanning such
books is get the best scanner with the newest software you can afford.
One extra bit for proofing, MS Word allows searching on format as well
as content. So for books with many footnote numbers, I have on occasion
put superscript in the search criteria, then start with 1, when I find
that and make sure it is formatted right, change the 1 to 2 in the
search, and so on. If an expected number doesn't show up, then I go back
to the book to find what page the missing number is on and fix that.
Tedious, tedious, tedious.
Misha
On 2/19/2016 12:42 PM, Judy s. wrote:
I just finished going through 900 pages of a book that is heavily footnoted, as in it has almost 2000 footnotes. The footnotes are all at the end of the book in a notes section, so that part was easy-ish to proofreader. However, making sure that the footnote numbers were actually maintained in the text itself by the scanning and OCR was a nightmare.
I'm sighted, so I was able to use scanned images from the book to help me find where missing footnote numbers went. Even so, it took months, working on it a little bit at a time, to make sure that the text had every single footnote number and that they were all formatted properly to Bookshare's standards. The scanner did a terrific job on this huge very complex book, except for the footnote numbers which were a bear for them to scan, so I didn't want to reject it.
If anyone has a better or different way to do this, I'd really appreciate if you could share it. It would be useful to me to know how everyone else, sighted or blind, tackles this kind of nightmare.
Even in a fairly simple book that has footnotes, what techniques seem to work to make sure that all of the footnote numbers are in the text?
--
Judy s.
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