Hi Roger,
I’m a sighted proofreader, and I’m willing to test your search-and-replace
theory in Lost River. Sounds like it might work. I have a pretty good eye for
paragraphing, so I think I’ll be able to judge the success even though I don’t
have the printed book. Bring it on!
Beverly COry
Sent from my iPad
On Nov 15, 2020, at 6:58 PM, Roger Loran Bailey (Redacted sender
rogerbailey81 for DMARC) <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Recently three of my scans were rejected due to insufficient paragraph
breaks. I scan one page at a time and read through it listening to the Karen
synthetic voice for errors before scanning the next page. Then every two
pages I do a spell check. While listening to the read through I find that it
reads smoothly and if there are missing paragraph breaks I don't know about
it. This is all really time consuming and to have all my work just trashed is
rather upsetting. This is exactly the kind of thing that seriously tempts me
to just quit volunteering. These books I have been doing lately are not even
the kinds of books that I am interested in. They are just books that have
been culled from a large trove of books from a friends of library sale and
were culled solely on the basis that they were not in the Bookshare
collection. So not only have I been putting in a lot of work on them, but I
have been boring myself too.
Anyway, when the rejections started coming I began examining the book I was
working on at the time. I was closing in on finishing it. That one does have
paragraph breaks, but I don't think it has all of them. So here is my first
question. Does anyone have any idea if some setting in my Open Book 9.0
software has changed and if so which setting it might be? It has been a long
time since I have changed those settings, at least consciously, because I
have them exactly the way I wanted them. Also, some of the settings have
never been changed. There are settings that I don't understand and have left
at the default because I expect that if I go messing with something I don't
understand I might mess up things completely.
Let me add, though, that I have reason to suspect that the problem is not my
settings. That is because, for one thing, not all of the paragraph breaks are
missing, at least not in my most recent scan. Also, it seems that when I
apply extra pressure to the book when scanning, to the point of my arms
trembling with the strain, there are more paragraph breaks. However, even
then I don't think I am picking up all of them.
Second, I think I see a possible fix for the rejected scan and the one that I
have now finished but have not yet submitted. While looking through the pages
I was scanning after I got the news of my rejected scan I noticed something
about the missing paragraph breaks. I am not really good at telling where one
paragraph ends and another one begins unless it is in dialog. In dialog every
time another character begins speaking a new paragraph starts. I noticed that
when this happened and there was no paragraph break there was an extra space
between the last quotation mark and the next one, sometimes three spaces.
Then when looking for the same thing in the narrative I did find two,
sometimes three, spaces between the last word of a sentence and the beginning
of the next at just the points at which it would make sense for a new
paragraph to start. So I think I see the fix. If these double or triple
spaces were globally replaced with paragraph breaks that should do the job.
However, I am doing all my work in Open Book and it has limited word
processing capabilities. That is why I scan books rather than proofread them.
So here is my proposal. If one of you would volunteer to take it I could
upload one of my rejected scans again with a hold on it for you. You could
try that global replacement I suggested providing that you think it is
feasible and then proofread the book. I propose the one that I was told was
one big paragraph from beginning to end. That was Lost River by Paxton
Riddle. It is a novelization of actual historical events, conflict between
the Modoc people of Northern California and the white settlers in the mid
nineteenth century. The author is a descendant of the main characters, a
Modoc woman and a white man who were married just as the conflict was
breaking out. I would like to upload this book alone until I find out if my
proposed fix will work. If it does then whoever takes it can inform me and I
will be back to ask if anyone wants the other three. If it doesn't work then
I suppose I will have to reconsider my options from that point. Anyone
interested? The first to offer will get the hold.
--
___
Sam Harris
“Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is
likely to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our
powers of wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the
one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our
innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we
have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is
true from what he has good reason to believe. The methodology isn't perfect,
and the history of science is riddled with abject failures of scientific
objectivity. But that is just the point-these have been failures of science,
discovered and corrected by-what, religion? No, by good science.”
― Sam Harris
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