Well, Kim, in those thousands of emails you missed (and I'm sure no one will complain if you don't read all of them) while your room was being renovated, are a few mentions of a simple word processor that reads and writes rtf files like wordpad, but does more, without the clutter (and cost) of Microsoft Word. That is Jarte. (at hey jarte.com). It is also advertised as being very screen reader friendly.
Unfortunately, it is missing a few features that are needed for a complete replacement of MS Word or K1000 for cleaning up scanned books and proofreading books for bookshare. It does not recognize section breaks (in fact it strips them out). Even if it left them in, there is no way to replace them with page breaks. My results with find and replace for other special characters (such as em dashes) is confusing. It seemed to work, but when I saved the file and went back into it, the original characters were back (I've really only done one test with that, so it could be a mistake I made).
On the other hand, it has some really neat features (aside from being free). It can be set to open to last file you were working on, at the place where you were working last. It strips out all the unnecessary extra formatting that Word puts in, but leaves all the kinds of formatting that bookshare uses (like font, font size, italics, underline, centering, page breaks, paragraphs, etc). This results in files that are about half the size of mine that were edited in Word (though, again, I've only tried a few files, so no guarantee).
I scanned a book, did the necessary section break fixes in Word, and am doing the rest of the cleanup in Jarte. I should be able to submit this book to bookshare this weekend (if I can force myself to spend more time actually cleaning up the scan and less time playing around with, I mean testing, Jarte).
Misha Kim Friedman wrote:
Pardon me, Mike, but what is Jarte? I've never heard of it. Regards, Kim.-----Original Message----- From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mike Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2010 10:38 PM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Proofreading Software OK, I downloaded Jarte and opened one of the books I am scanning. I looked at the first few pages fairly carefully and skimmed the rest. As far as I can tell, all the formatting that I want in there and that I know bookshare would like to have in there is correct. So, I saved a copy in Jarte. TheJarte copy is half the size of the Word version.I am not really blaming all the bloat on Word. I use Omnipage for OCR, but through the "acquire text" feature in Word (because the user interface in Omnipage is completely opaque to me) and I am pretty sure that in an effort to format the page like what is scanned, Omnipage puts many format changes in as Word "styles." Then I come in and change the formatting to be more uniform and Word does not eliminate the old styles, but creates new ones in the form "old style+make all text times new roman 12 point." Jarte, not caring about styles, cleans that all out and leaves only actual changes in font, italics, bold and so on (as I would think Word would do, but no). I'm going to try scanning into Word, then doing the cleanup in Jarte and seehow it goes (I'd pay Jarte money to have the acquire text feature). And, the real test will be if bookshare accepts the the book.Hmmm, where is a short book to try, I been into doing so many long books lately, but I'd really like to see whether this works relatively soon. Earthworks by Brian Aldiss, 128 pages. Africa is the last frontier...in a starving and overpopulated world. A world gone dry. A world of horror where literacy and thought are for machines only. Where cities are behives built on stilts to protect them from the chemicals which grow crops. Where penal institutions are collective farms. Where petty infractions condemn men to work for the rest of their lives alongside robots tilling the dead soil. The world is a place where corpses stalk the earth, for there is no longer room in the ground. Africa is the last hope... Not very cheery, but it is short (compared to the 750 page book that the phrase "Rackin' threes" that I mentioned in another email comes from). Misha To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line. __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4972 (20100324) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4972 (20100324) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4973 (20100325) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4973 (20100325) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.comTo unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.
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