Hello, Alison's response sounds good to me. Since I run a transcription operation that produces math and science books in Braille, I am keenly aware of the importance of preserving page breaks. I hope AFS from maplefish will be adequate for editing rtf. I've been so busy following this thread that I haven't tried it yet. John On Fri, 14 Jun 2002, Janina Sajka wrote: > 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 > > > > -- Computers to Help People, Inc. http://www.chpi.org 825 East Johnson; Madison, WI 53703