[bookshare-discuss] Re: Ellipses and em-dashes
- From: Guido Corona <guidoc@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 11:45:07 -0500
Furthermore, the primary publishing format for Bookshare books is Daisy,
which being HTML0-based will retain all character entities such as long
dashes and all font changes. The Bookshare Braille translator will take
care of conversions as appropriate.
Once again we should submit/edit for maximum information in RTF and let
the Bookshare system take care of any necessary degradation.
Guido
Guido D. Corona
IBM Accessibility Center, Austin Tx.
IBM Research,
Phone: (512) 838-9735
Email: guidoc@xxxxxxxxxxx
Visit my weekly Accessibility WebLog at:
http://www-3.ibm.com/able/weblog/corona_weblog.html
Guido Corona/Austin/IBM@IBMUS
Sent by:
09/30/2004 11:27 AM
Please respond to
bookshare-discuss
To
bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
cc
Subject
[bookshare-discuss] Re: Ellipses and em-dashes
If you use Kurzweil 1000 long dashes are kept. PLEASE do not replace long
dashes with anything else.
Only downlevel versions of Openbook massacre long dashes. Please update
your OpenBook to the latest version or use Kurzweil. A long dash is a
character entity encoded by a short series of bytes: it will survive in a
text file.
Italics are a different kettle of fish and survive only in RTF, KES, or
other marked up format. But once again, do not remove or change to
something else. Just retain as RTF and submit the RTF file to Bookshare.
In general, we should not degrade the body content of the document if at
all possible.
Guido
Guido D. Corona
IBM Accessibility Center, Austin Tx.
IBM Research,
Phone: (512) 838-9735
Email: guidoc@xxxxxxxxxxx
Visit my weekly Accessibility WebLog at:
http://www-3.ibm.com/able/weblog/corona_weblog.html
shannon work
Sent by:
09/29/2004 09:09 PM
Please respond to
bookshare-discuss
To
<bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
cc
Subject
[bookshare-discuss] Re: Ellipses and em-dashes
Cindy,
I am not trying to split hairs but just need a little clarification on
something.
In the post you made, wich I left atached, you make mention of something
called an en dash, and an m dash.
Is this something different or was that a typo?
Like I said not trying to split hairs but I just learned about the M dash
and this EN dash has me a little confused.
I'm sorry, and apologise if I am pestering but, I am lost and never was
much
good at punctuation.
Thanks for the time,
Shannon
----- Original Message -----
From: "Cindy" <popularplace@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2004 6:27 PM
Subject: [bookshare-discuss] Ellipses and em-dashes
> I'm glad I read more posts before explaining the
> difference between ellipses and em dashes. Guido did a
> very good job. I'd just like to add a little more to
> his explanation -- but before I do, Guido -- the em
> dash isn't retained in txt. I'm validating this in
> Word in larger font, so I can see it better, but I did
> what someone suggested and closed and saved it in the
> original txt to see what formatting was kept. The em
> dashes, line breaks, and italics all were lost. So I'm
> following the same person's suggestion (Kellie or
> Jana, I think) and using a doulbe hyphen,with a space
> on either side.
>
> Ellipses are used, as the original poster (Was it
> Dave?) said, to show that something has been
> eliminated from a quotation. They can also be used to
> show that a sentence is unfinished, as opposed to
> being interrupted. I don't have any examples of that
> in the book I'm doing now, but . . .
>
> O.K. That was one. I couldn't think of how to finish
> the sentence, so I used ellipses. Here's another: As
> Mary came downstairs, John said, "Maybe tonight we
> could . . . " His voice trailed off as he saw the man
> behind her."
>
> As Guido said, an em dash is a long dash, used to
> interrupt a sentence with a different thought,
> parenthetical or xplanatory but not necessarily strong
> enough to be in parentheses. Here is an example from
> the book I;m validating: "She gave a tiny laugh (em
> dash) a nervous one, he thought (em dash) when it
> took a minute for their strides to coordinate . . ."
> (Here the ellipsis is because I'm not finishing the
> sentence). Another examaple: "Daph (em dash)"
> Another person interrupts: "I know." Here the em dash
> shows that the person who was speaking was interrupted
> rather than that he lost his train of thought.
>
> I admit that since en dashes are used so rarely, I
> can't think at the moment of why one would be used
> instead of an em-dash except for poetic effect, which
> is why I think it was used in Silk.
>
> I hope this explanation isn't too long-winded or
> doesn't repeat anything anyone has already written
> that I haven't yet seen. And that it clarifies the
> differences. As Guido says, and as you all know, a
> hyphen connects compound words or breaks words at ends
> of sentences when they don't fit on a line. But those
> we close. Unfortunately, sometimes, as with the book
> I've validating, scanners, and maybe validators, sue a
> global replace to eliminate all hyphens and that
> results in their being eliminated where they sometimes
> belong.
>
> Cindy
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
> http://vote.yahoo.com
>
Other related posts:
