Dear Mr. Fruchterman, Hope, and fellow BookSharians,
I agree with your comments Hope!
You are all loving!
Blessings, Pat Ferguson forever loving BookShare
Your objectives are good. It would also be helpful to have Chapter titles if they are in the print books. Ideally it would be nice if the book share books could have the exact content of the print books including chapters, page numbers etc.
Thank you for your hard work and for the opportunity given to us to read lots of books.
Smile
Hope
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:Jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx>Jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To: <mailto:bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2005 2:05 AM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Page numbers and headers/footers
Hey, I promised my next post would be on this topic. Here it is!
Let's talk about the objectives we had in creating today's workflow:
Take a bunch of text file formats as input, and get them to RTF
Create an automated tool to turn the RTF into a single XML file
Use that single source file to create a DAISY book, and a BRF book
Capture page tags and page numbers correctly
Hopefully capture chapter tags
We weren't able to automatically get chapter tags four years ago, and haven't been able to put much effort into it since. As many of you know, we surveyed our users some time back and got a lot of feedback (more than half of our users at that time responded) that improving quality was a big deal. We've been trying to upgrade all Fair quality books, and focusing more on high quality content. We've also moved away from accepting books without pages, since we regard page numbers as the minimum navigation requirement to meet basic quality standards.
Rather than getting into the deep discussion of whys and wherefores, let me test out an ideal solution to make sure I know what people would want:
On the input side, correct print page numbering captured in all of our books
On the output side, the ability to have these print page numbers and headers and footers accessible in either DAISY or BRF formats: people who don't want them don't see them, and people who do want them do see them
If this worked perfectly, would people be happy? By making sure we're clear on the ideal solution, we can go back to how we're missing and how to get closer to the ideal than we are doing today. The timing is good, because we're designing Bookshare.org's first overhaul, and we need to know where we're going. We already know that we're likely to get a much different input stream three years from now than we did in the past three years, so the input processing workflow is definitely getting revisited.
Jim Fruchterman President and CEO Benetech
480 California Avenue, Suite 201 Palo Alto, California 94306 USA +1 650 475-5440 extension 106 Fax: +1 650 475-1066
<mailto:jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx>jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx www.benetech.org
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