I'm not aware of any mainline OCR packages that save as Daisy files. The
only Daisy software I know of is for converting an existing document to
Daisy which would seem a bit pointless as it would need to be converted
back to RTF anyway. If the ones you are talking about are betas, that
wouldn't seem the way to go, as by the virtue of being a beta, they are in
their test phase, and not something we should be introducing into the system.
Regarding the Word DOC files, Word can save in RTF nearly as easily as in
DOC, just a couple of more keystrokes, and they have to be converted to RTF
sooner or later. Additionally, there are so many versions of Word out
there, and not all are compatible. You're not going to load a document
saved in Word 2K with Word 95 or 97 unless the person saving in 2K saved in
one of those formats, or if the 95 - 97 user has the appropriate plug-ins.
I'm not even going to touch the BRF issue, as I'm not a braille user, and I
imagine that one could really stir up a major controversy. I have to admit
though, while I don't use braille, the books I usually download are the
braille copies as they are smaller and easier for me to deal with. I click
on the BKS file, hit the space bar, enter my password, enter a new DOS
style name for the file, click Y for open now, N for unpack another, and
then go get the TXT version out of my book directory where NFBTrans has put
it for my Book Port.
There are always exceptions to every case, but since the objective formats
are RTF, BRF, and TXT, why introduce unnecessary difficulties, or work.
At 10:00 AM 12/10/2004, you wrote:
Hello. I would like to dispute a couple points in your message. First, yes there is software currently in beta test which allows one to create DAISY books. Just because it is uncommon doesn't immediately mean that it is from an illegal or commercial source. Second, I would like to see the elimination of .brf. It is inconvenient to convert to a usable format for those without embossers or Braille displays and there is a far more likely chance of an illegal brf being submitted because of NLS and web Braille files. Unfortunately, MS Word is very common so .doc really needs to be supported. I would like to see the system convert .doc to .rtf though before the book gets to the validation pool.
