Hi Katherine,
That's a great thought about using paragraph styles. However, the
Bookshare converter strips paragraph styles from documents, while
maintaining actual codes that tell Word (or the converter) where
paragraphs end, where page breaks are, and what is the bolding, italics
and font size for each letter in the document, etc., if that makes sense.
Because there are literally an infinite number of ways paragraph styles
can be set, a converter like Bookshare uses has to ignore the styles and
look for the "hard" codes (like paragraph marks, bolding, etc.) to
translate Word files into the consistent format that standardizes
paragraphs and fonts and the like. In a sense, Bookshare's converter has
its own "master" paragraph style that replaces any paragraph style that
comes in to it.
It's tough for all of us volunteers when proofreading to figure out what
are "hard" codes and what aren't "hard" codes that Bookshare's converter
will or won't change when weird stuff shows up in a file. In this case,
opting for replacing the vertical tab makes sense to me as the way to
tackle it. But that's only because 1) I know that it's a "hard" code
(and I know that because I actually used those washing-machine-sized
printers way back when vertical tabs did something useful!) and 2) at
the same time there isn't any documentation from Bookshare that tells us
what the converter is going to do with it.
Judy s.
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On 6/29/2016 5:44 PM, Katherine Petersen (Redacted sender
katherine_petersen for DMARC) wrote:
Hi There,
Judy can probably explain it better, since I think she’s more of a word expert than I am, but it’s an option on the page layout tab that allows you to set tabs and line spacing for a document. When you do this the paragraphs are all in the same style throughout the text.
Sounds like the book has funky paragraph styling though, so this might not help.
In a couple of books I scanned, I ended up with a letter on each line for a couple pages and changing the paragraph styles got the text back to normal.
Best,
--Katherine
