[blindlaw] outlining method- maybe an oddball idea

[Robert Munro]

I had trouble with roman numerals too during my 1L year, both in the
outlines I prepared and in textbooks.  Here's how I dealt with the issue.

To have JAWS distinguish between Arabic and roman numerals, Open your JAWS
default dictionary and create definitions for the roman numerals.  Here are
some things to keep in mind when you do this.

1.  Have JAWS say "roman two," or something similar, for roman numeral two,
"roman three" for roman numeral three, ETC.

2.  Make sure your definitions are not case sensitive; that way, JAWS will
catch both big and little roman numerals.  Of course, you could create two
sets of definitions, one for big roman numerals and another for little ones,
with JAWS saying "big roman two" and "little roman two" respectively.  I
chose not to do this.

3.  Skip roman numerals that consist of only one letter: I, V, L, X, C, D,
and M.  These pop up too often in normal text.  It will only confuse things
if JAWS is treating them as roman numerals instead of letters.

Good luck prepping for exams.  I hope my comments have been helpful.

Onward!

Rob Munro

-----Original Message-----
From: blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Johnston
Sent: Friday, November 13, 2009 9:44 PM
To: NFBnet Blind Law Mailing List
Subject: [blindlaw] outlining method- maybe an oddball idea

Hi folks,

Thanks to everyone who sent me ideas for outlining.  Bruce, your ideas about
K1000 were especially generative.  I realized that it would be easiest (for
me) to comprehend an outline if it were in the tree format that is used to
expand/collapse folders and subfolders in Kurzweil's Save As window.  Each
level would represent a certain heading level, and opening a branch would
display its subheadings.  It would allow tracing of paths like a flow chart.
Has anyone else thought of or tried using something like this?  Is this
something that could be done in Excel?  I'm not super proficient at the
program, but would have no clue how to construct a database (perhaps the
alternative).

Using the search feature in Word to jump from a specified heading to the
same specified heading is fine, except that it is a one-trick pony unless
altering the search.  Using the move by paragraph operation is good for
moving step by step, but it doesn't allow easy comprehension of the big
picture; JAWS doesn't even do a great job distinguishing between Roman and
Arabic numerals.  Kurzweil might be a better option for creating a standard
outline, but it will take some getting used to losing the 10 digit keypad
for navigation.  So far, I've only used the program for OCR, and save the
files to Word for reading.

Thanks again!

Jay
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