Hi everyone,
Some of you may remember that I bought an Opticbook 4800 scanner by Plustek
and I must report that it's working wonderfully. It takes me six seconds to
scan a page and change the book to the next page.
I decided to follow this with a new computer. My old one was six or more
years old and slow. MS Word took 30 to 60 seconds to load and JAWS took
sometimes two minutes to talk.
I bought a Dell XPS 8930-9700 desktop which has an SSD drive and an I7 ninth
generation processor with 16 gigs of RAM. Boy is it fast. When I scan a
page, the recognition is finished before the flatbed scanner head even
begins its return. Once in a while a messy picture slows this down but not
very much. MS Word loads rapidly and JAWS begins speaking in ten seconds and
all icons are loaded in 30 seconds.
I use MS Word in Office 365 to scan or proof books and have found that
macros can make this work easier.
I wonder if anybody else uses macros and what the circumstances might be.
To spark some thinking and discussion, I show below what I have done and the
reasons for it.
Currently I have four macros which I created and assigned to key
combinations alt-7 alt-8 alt-9 and alt-0. I found that I could use JAWS to
do this without sighted assistance. These key combinations were not used by
any application I use.
My alt-7 macro makes a normal footnote into a superscript but requires
preparation of the file with an asterisk before each footnote which is then
deleted by the macro. You press it once to convert one footnote. You can do
a 750-footnote book in a couple of minutes! It requires 750 presses of that
key combination but believe me I had done 1600 on a book manually so am
happy with this development.
My alt-8 macro makes a subchapter bold and in 14 pt. Subchapters have to be
preceded with a number sign which is then deleted by the macro. You press
once to do one title. And then, boom, boom, boom etc to finish the job.
My alt-9 macro does the same thing for chapter titles but in 16 pt. I
resorted to this macro because I recently proofed a book with about 160
chapters and didn't want to do each one manually. The file is prepared with
two number signs before each chapter name and these are removed by the
macro. You press once for each chapter title. As you do this Jaws reads the
page number you're on so that gives you context as you go.
My alt-0 macro takes a scanned index done by Kurzweil in de-columnized mode
and makes all the changes to turn this into a pretty good-looking index. It
puts each entry on a line of its own, adds a space between commas and
subsequent page numbers and makes other internal global corrections such as
changing m-dash (which in indexes occurs sometimes in page numbers) to a
hyphen. Sure the index still gets read but much of it is fixed in a split
second. The index must be scanned separately or separated temporarily from
the book to be operated on in this way. One good reason for this is that
global fixes in an index shouldn't be done in a text because the
circumstances are different. An example of this is the em-dash which in text
is usually more properly rendered by two hyphens because it is likely to
occur between words whereas in the index, if it's there, it's usually
between page numbers and should be rendered as a hyphen.
The above comments don't explain every facet of preparing a book for these
operations but they indicate what is possible.
Hope this was interesting and understandable.
I admit I'm a little strange for liking indexes, but they are handy in
nonfiction books which may list the members of a family and ancestors and
descendants in a way that makes looking them up easy. An example is a book
on Johann Sebastian Bach. Such a book's index lists many of his ancestors
and descendants and sometimes their spouses or children. The index is a
handy way to find and organize this information in one's mind. That's why I
like indexes.
Happy holidays to all of you.
