Dear Roger,
I proofread using JAWS with punctuation turned on. I down arrow listening to
one line at a time. This way I can hear where paragraphs need to go.
I have the good fortune to proofread for some of the most accomplished
scanners in our volunteer group and I usually find some missing paragraph
breaks in just about every book. I can't imagine how a scan could occur with
no paragraph breaks at all. Sometimes I can tell visually using my CCTV how
some errors occur due to eccentric fonts and layouts.
I'll write off list with an offer to proofread one of your scans.
I hope someone here gives you some technical help. I'm hopeless in that
department.
Always with love,
Lissi
-----Original Message-----
From: Roger Loran Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Sunday, November 15, 2020 9:58 PM
To: bksvol-discuss
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Paragraph Breaks
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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