[duxuser] Re: paragraph formatting (was Re: NEED HELP WITH PARAGRAPH STYLE)
- From: "George Bell" <george@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <duxuser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2007 16:05:29 -0000
Hi Steve,
I've had many, many years of what you call the "painfully
tedious process" of tidying up documents getting them ready
to braille. We get documents from many different people.
And worse still, we get many large documents which have been
put together from other documents produced by different
people.
I've also put many hundreds, if not thousands, of hours into
trying to think up logical ways of streamlining the process.
Even what might appear to be a simple process of replacing
two hard carriage returns with one is fraught with potential
problems. The worst is probably when you get a hard
carriage return at the end of every single line, and only if
you are lucky, perhaps each paragraph "might" be indented by
specific number of spaces.
Sometimes you have no alternative but to strip a Word
document down to plain text, and re-format it with Styles
from scratch. This usually requires that a sighted
transcriber prints out a hard copy of the original document,
and works from that.
The ONLY, and I stress "ONLY", way forward, is to try and
educate users to use the program properly, and to do this
you have to use some applied psychology. The "This will
help me, and make it easier for you too.", is often the best
approach in many cases, and you'd be surprised how helpful
people can be if approached this way.
Our "Word - Top 10 Tips" has been remarkably successful in
this regard. I can make copies in Word and PDF available if
you think it might help in some cases.
All the best,
George bell.
-----Original Message-----
From: duxuser-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:duxuser-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steve
Dresser
Sent: 21 January 2007 15:33
To: duxuser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [duxuser] Re: paragraph formatting (was Re: NEED
HELP WITH PARAGRAPH STYLE)
Jean,
You're absolutely right about the correct way to achieve
blank lines, but
here's the problem: As a braille producer, I get Word
documents all the
time from people who *don't* know any of the things you're
talking about,
and probably never will. I just want an option that I can
turn on or off so
I can deal with the practical problem of cleaning up the
documents I get.
At the moment, that's a painfully tedious process that can
take hours
because it literally requires going through the document
line by line. Now,
if you can suggest a rapid and efficient way to deal with
this problem, I'm
all ears.
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jean Menzies" <jemenzies@xxxxxxx>
To: <duxuser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, January 21, 2007 03:17
Subject: [duxuser] Re: Spam Characteristics: Re: NEED HELP
WITH PARAGRAPH
STYLE
>
>
> Steve,
>
> No, no, no! It is very incorrect to have two line breaks
to signify a
> paragraph break in a word document. If you are thinking of
the visual
> blank space that "looks like" two line breaks, it is
terribly wrong to
> achieve that by pressing the return key two times. That
can result in
> widow/orphan blank lines at the top and bottom of print
pages, etc. The
> correct way in print is to set your points before or after
to 12 in your
> paragraph style definition. This gives the appearance of
the "extra" white
> space in print but retains the correct formatting of ONE
press of the
> return key for ONE paragraph change. You do not create
white space in
> print through use of the return key, but through proper
use of styles.
> Sorry, but you're wrong here in terms of what constitutes
a paragraph
> versus a new line.
>
> Jean
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