I have forwarded some of the mail on this thread to Book Share. I am now forwarding the response I received to this list, because I think it both instructive and responsive to the needs of Linux users: NOTE: I've edited out some personal points in the message I received. >From Alison@benetech.org Fri Jun 14 12:36:51 2002 From: Alison Lingane <Alison@benetech.org> Thanks so much for passing along the posts to us - we're glad to know what people's concerns are. HTML was definitely considered when we chose one format, but the drawback it has is that it loses page break information if it is in the original file. This is important to maintain in books, especially for students who have assignments based on page numbers. To explain to you in a little more detail, the book conversion process goes like this: 1. Volunteer submits a file in any format 2. Another volunteer (or staff) converts the file to RTF. We chose RTF because it keeps as much markup information as possible, but isn't a proprietary format, and most programs have a "save as RTF". Knowing the answer to John's post of what files can be used with Linux to accomplish this would be helpful. Volunteers can also re-submit as ASCII, but this loses any markup present in the book. (If the book was submitted in ASCII, we try to have it resubmitted in ASCII so false markup isn't added.) 3. Our software converts RTF to the XML content file of the DAISY standard. 4. Our automated software tools run on this XML file - quality assessment, OCR correct, etc. 5. Our tools then convert this XML file to DAISY, BRF (actually, we use Duxbury for this), and in the case of public domain books, HTML and ASCII. Hopefully this explains things a little more, but I'm happy to answer other questions! Alison -- Janina Sajka, Director Technology Research and Development Governmental Relations Group American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) Email: janina@afb.net Phone: (202) 408-8175 Chair, Accessibility SIG Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF) http://www.openebook.org Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html