Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexBell
Thanks for all the suggestions.
I had a little chat with the co-author, and she's in process of manually removing the excess carriage returns, chapter by chapter. She misses a few, but it's no problem to find them when I'm proofing. And it makes a tremendous difference to the ease of setting up the HTML.
|
You know, it's funny. We have an article, that sets out all the steps that it takes for an author-pub to go from physical book to eBook using Scanning, on our site, and in our canned responses. I realize that's not what you're doing, but...similar enough. No matter
how many times I explain it, they never get it. Until
afterward, when they get the scan, whether it's raw, or the scanning company has done a basic word-match edit (from the PDF proof to the Word file, I mean).
I always try to prepare them, and explain that generally, the misspelt words or misread words (fiat=hat type of thing) aren't going to be the really hard bits; the hard bits are exactly what you're dealing with. The pilcrows that have landed utterly out of place. The paras that break at the end of one page--at the end of a sentence, and a new sentence, flush to the left, is at the top of the next page. New paragraph, after a scene break? Or just a continuation of the previous?
They also get freaked out when they can't figure out how to remove the section breaks.
I tell them that our automated clips will find, depending on the book, between 80-97% of the broken paras. But we see books that our in-house analyses tell us have 600, 800 or more broken paragraphs. When you start figuring how many possible errors there are, if you only find 80%--man, that adds up. They almost always ask us to do it (usually until I mention the fees involved, to do it by hand/eye), but the part that they don't get is how much of it has to be READ, to get those that can
only be corrected with context.
It's frustrating. There are some things, over the years, that I've found good everyday exemplars and analogies for; but broken paragraphs seems to be nearly impossible to explain to someone who doesn't really "get" paragraph codes, styles, outlines, headings, and all that good stuff. Even with screenshots to explain, and quick-n-dirty exports to HTML, viewed in a browser resized to screen size. They just don't understand the WHY. Why their sentences are breaking in half. You know, until someone understands the role of a paragraph, as a fundamental component of a word-processing document (you know, character, word, paragraph, etc.), trying to explain it is usually
hopeless. That, or, I'm just a really crappy explainer.
At least your story has a reasonably happy ending, Alex!
Hitch