Hello Lori, and welcome to the list. Please don't say that you're "just" validating! Most of us do one or the other, scan or validate, and they are both crucial to the process. What program are you using to read your books? If JAWS and WindowEyes reads the text fluently, then there's probably some other reason why there appears to be only one character per line. If it was like that in reality, JAWS or WindowEyes would read it character by character even in constant read mode. Generally speaking, most of us will clean out junk characters around page numbers or anywhere else they occur. You have to be a little careful about doing a search and replace with extra page breaks. First, in some books, there are blank pages in the print edition. For instance, in some books, if the chapter ends on the righthand page, when you turn the page, the lefthand page will be blank and the new chapter will start at the top of the righthand page. In that case, the blank page should be left in the scanned copy as it is consistent with the print copy. However, we've noticed that sometimes, opening RTF files in different programs can add in extra pages that shouldn't be there. E just worked on a book I scanned and when she opened it in Kurzweil, it added in a blank page between every page in the book. Still, doing a general search and replace of page breaks, would take out all the page breaks, and we don't want that either. It depends on which program you are using to edit the file as to what might work. Hope this isn't too confusing. Thanks for volunteering with us. Donna To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.