[bksvol-discuss] Re: paragraph spacing
- From: "Sarah Van Oosterwijck" <curiousentity@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 11:12:46 -0600
It doesn't matter too much how you format paragraphs, because most people
either read with speech or braille, in which case they don't experience your
formatting, or they can adjust the paragraph formatting to suit their needs
once they download the book from bookshare. What is very important is that you
let your software do the formatting--meaning that you use Word's paragraph
formatting menu to set how paragraphs are displayed, because that will let the
conversion software handle paragraphs in whatever way makes sense for the
format used. Besides, that method really is a lot easier and faster than
manipulating every paragraph by hand.
Really I believe bookshare's software only looks for paragraphs, but doesn't
actually preserve or care about how they were formatted in the original.
Deciding how to display paragraphs is a matter for the software being used by
the reader and totally depends on the format being used.
DAISY seems to suppress blank lines for paragraphs, HTML double spaces
paragraphs, and BRF uses a single new line character followed by a two space
indent.
The only exception I would give to this rule is for TXT files. If you submit
the TXT file back to bookshare as an RTF everything is fine, but if you upload
as TXT then paragraphing you have done in your Word processor may very well be
lost, so double returns may be the only way to allow any paragraphing to
survive the conversion process. Unfortunately the hole paragraphing issue with
TXT files is something I haven't completely figured out, so I can't write
anything more informative or clear. I'd just suggest that you avoid uploading
TXT files.
Sarah Van Oosterwijck
Assistive Technology Trainer
http://home.earthlink.net/~netentity
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