I'm not sure what you're saying here. Are you saying that Braille readers
have said that they prefer blank lines between paragraphs? If so, then I
would just say that I am *definitely* not one of them. I have been reading
Braille books for decades, and it just doesn't feel natural to me to have
blank lines between paragraphs. Now that I read books on a Braille display,
I don't like them for an additional reason: I have to scroll past a blank
line after each paragraph. I just don't see the point, not to mention the
extra button push or scroll click needed, which adds up to thousands for
each book. My OpenBook puts blank lines between paragraphs when I save in
.rtf format, and the first thing I do - thanks to Jake's helpful
information - is eliminate them in Word.
If you didn't actually say that most Braille readers prefer blank lines
between paragraphs, then I'm sorry for wasting your time, but as it is
worded, it seems a bit ambiguous.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Cindy" <popularplace@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006 11:21 AM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: paragraph spacing
Sarah,
Thank you for the information. We can now validate and upload txt files as rtf--one of the major improvements bookshare has made.
I do use Word, and have figured out out to set the indentations of paragraphs in the document as a whole, but how would I set it for skipping lines between paragraphs? Where would I find that? Not that I want to any more, after your explanation of what happens to the skipped lines--although Braille readers were the ones, as I recall, who said they preferred that--but I am curious to know, in case I do want to. SOme of the books I validate already have skipped linesw betwween paragraphs and then I don't change them, of course.
Cindy
--- Sarah Van Oosterwijck <curiousentity@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It doesn't matter too much how you format paragraphs, because most people either read with speech or braille, in which case they don't experience your formatting, or they can adjust the paragraph formatting to suit their needs once they download the book from bookshare. What is very important is that you let your software do the formatting--meaning that you use Word's paragraph formatting menu to set how paragraphs are displayed, because that will let the conversion software handle paragraphs in whatever way makes sense for the format used. Besides, that method really is a lot easier and faster than manipulating every paragraph by hand. Really I believe bookshare's software only looks for paragraphs, but doesn't actually preserve or care about how they were formatted in the original. Deciding how to display paragraphs is a matter for the software being used by the reader and totally depends on the format being used. DAISY seems to suppress blank lines for paragraphs, HTML double spaces paragraphs, and BRF uses a single new line character followed by a two space indent.
The only exception I would give to this rule is for TXT files. If you submit the TXT file back to bookshare as an RTF everything is fine, but if you upload as TXT then paragraphing you have done in your Word processor may very well be lost, so double returns may be the only way to allow any paragraphing to survive the conversion process. Unfortunately the hole paragraphing issue with TXT files is something I haven't completely figured out, so I can't write anything more informative or clear. I'd just suggest that you avoid uploading TXT files.
Sarah Van Oosterwijck Assistive Technology Trainer http://home.earthlink.net/~netentity
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
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.
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.
