[bksvol-discuss] Re: apostrophe as single quote
- From: "Sarah Van Oosterwijck" <curiousentity@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 10:21:11 -0600
Ah sighted people, smile> Especially the not particularly computer literate
ones, can really cause more confusion then good when asked about characters you
wish to create or eliminate from electronic documents. <smile> I'm not really
criticizing them, since they just don't happen to know much about the topic,
but I'm warning you that their advice can not always be trusted. Kurzweil and
to some degree your screen reader, knows much more about the document than can
be learned by a sighted person looking at the printed characters on the screen
or in the book. They are kind of like that plastic or wax food they see in
pictures in the menus they consult and then announce, "Mmm, that looks so good,
I think I'll have that." I'd find it so hilarious if they were actually brought
the prop material that was actually used in the picture. LOL
The accent mark on the key above the tab is not the slightest bit related to an
apostrophe or a single quote. It just happens to be a mark that curves in the
same direction as an apostrophe. Sighted people also have no problems with
closing single quotes and apostrophes being used interchangeably because they
really do look the same, but as you have already learned they are not always
the best thing for the electronic copy of the book, because they are really
different characters and will not necessarily be read or transcribed correctly.
Why not just select the offensive character and copy it to the clipboard.
Paste it in the find box and replace all of them with an apostrophe. If for
some reason you don't like that plan then you can produce a single close quote
at will by pressing and holding down the alt key while typing the number 0146
on the numb-pad. Kurzweil will call it close single quote, so you will know it
is correct. JAWS and open book users won't be informed of the difference
between the characters, so only the character number can warn you of the
difference as apostrophe is character 39 not character 146. It's useful that
JAWS doesn't differentiate while reading a file, but it isn't so good that Open
Book decides to use them interchangeably like Word.
If anyone has more questions about character problems then please go to Jake's
tip page and read the tip I submitted about potential problem characters. The
information can also be quite useful to people who transfer documents to a note
taker for reading in braille, since the same characters often cause issues for
them.
I really want to make a Word macro for fixing up documents for transfer to my
BrailleNote, but I've lost every macro I've ever made for Word, so I'm not too
enthused about the prospect.
Sarah Van Oosterwijck
Assistive Technology Trainer
http://home.earthlink.net/~netentity
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