[Dtb-talk] Free DAISY Software Installation Issues

[David Nelson]

There is another perspective to this software tools ease-of-use issue that
I'd like to mention in this discussion thread.

As a publisher, my company wants to produce books as DAISY Digital Talking
Books. We think we have the technical expertise to use the software tools
being discussed, but it is not always easy to know when it makes practical
sense to attempt production work with them.

As we look at the situation, we are trying to determine what we CAN do to
make the task easier for the next person in the workflow that results in a
DTB that we can confidently provide to our customers. For example, we are
trying to educate ourselves about how to prepare a styled Word file in the
best possible way so that a more capable service provider can do the rest of
the work more efficiently -- keeping costs down and quality high.

And as we determine what is best for getting structure built into a Word
file, we want to expand that understanding to our editorial work so that the
presentational book design does not build in hierarchical problems that have
to be sorted out for the logical DAISY structures.

Of course, we also like to imagine a work flow that allows us to use open
source tools to do more and more of the work on our own. Ease of use is
obviously important to go down that path. If any other publishers are on
this discussion list, I'd enjoy hearing from you about how you are
approaching this situation.

So, having said all that, I want to be clear that I'm glad to see any and
all of the emerging software tools for doing this work. My objective is to
avoid throwing in the towel on creating DTBs because we get hung up on any
of the technical conduits along the way.

Best regards,
David Nelson, Attainment Company






 

-----Original Message-----
From: dtb-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:dtb-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Peter Donahue
Sent: Friday, May 08, 2009 1:54 PM
To: Discussion of Digital Talking Books
Subject: [Dtb-talk] Free DAISY Software Installation Issues

Hello David and Listers,

    I've had installation issues with the Microsoft Save as DAISY Add-in, 
OBI, and most recently AMIS when I  installed them on our machines. I 
recently had such an issue when installing AMIS on a brand new machine we 
purchassed for my wife last week when her old PC blew up.

    Some here have said that there's no need to spend big bucks for this 
type of software, but if you're constantly having installation wars with 
free DAISY production and reading programs you're better off to pay the 
bucks rather than putting up with one big hassle. If developers continue to 
produce these free tools they need to do a better job of noting in the 
system requirements additional components needed for the software to run, or

better yet installing these programs on multiple computer environments to be

sure they will install and run correctly. David you're not the only one who 
has had these kind of issues.

Peter Donahue
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Nelson" <david at attainmentcompany.com>
To: "'Discussion of Digital Talking Books'" <dtb-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, May 08, 2009 9:47 AM
Subject: Re: [Dtb-talk] Braille Monitor in Daisy format