Hello Aidee,
Those are Unicode symbols. I see quite a few of them in certain books I get.
Apparently the braille translator puts those in where (I’m guessing) there’s no
entry in the translation table for that character.
I’m not sure what the o u sign and the x signify, but to the right of the x and
to the left of the second dot 3 is a combination of numbers and (often) one
letter. If you do a search on Google and put Unicode and those numbers and/or
letters, it’ll tell you what the symbol represents.
I have also been reluctant to enter quality reports about these books for fear
of them being withdrawn.
Evan
From: Aidee Campa
Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2017 4:07 AM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] noticed something odd in PQ books
Hello All:
This is Aidee, one of the proofers. I am writing to see if anyone else has
noticed something odd in recently added PQ books, or if it’s just me and my
BrailleNote.
I’ve downloaded a couple of books that have asterisks and/or unusual letters,
or accented letters. The reason I’m not exactly sure about the latter is
because of how they appear in BRF files. What I think are asterisks look like
an apostrophe/dot 3, the o u sign, an x, dots 2 3, dots 3 5 6, dots 2 3, dots 2
3, and another apostrophe/dot 3. This was in a book called The Thing About
Love. In another book, titled The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales, words
with non-English letters had this craziness show up: dot 3, an o u sign, an x,
dots 3 5 6, dot 2, dots 3 5 6, dot 2, and dot 3, followed by a letter, which
I’m not sure if is supposed to be part of the craziness, or just read as
“normal” to the conversion software.
Anyway, this could be a potential issue, especially if it shows up in books
that people intend for use in academic settings, as it could make understanding
material difficult, depending on the context.
So, if anyone else has noticed this, please let me know. Otherwise, I’m bound
to think its an illusion brought on by sleep deprivation and too much reading.
I hope that made sense. Thank you all so much for everything.
