In the production of educational material to be printed in Braille, it is important to have good digital source documents. Today, I will explain which strategies to use to obtain them.

In Braille printing, all digital texts can be used and/or adapted — sometimes, no adaptation is needed — but having good source documents will minimize the preparation work.

Having the texts already in digital format relieves us from the task of acquiring them from paper. If possible, it is always preferable to have or attempt to obtain the electronic version of documents, as it will avoid the acquisition process. Unless the electronic book is an old text full of errors and poorly formatted; in this case, it's better to spend an hour acquiring the text from paper rather than wasting ten trying to make sense of the digital wreckage.

To obtain books in electronic format:

1. Purchase the electronic version of the book. In many cases, publishers distribute electronic versions of their books;
2. If only the print version is available, try requesting the electronic version from the publisher. Today, any book is printed using electronic files. Some publishers are responsive and, upon appropriately explaining their needs, are willing to provide the electronic version of their books;
3. Try to obtain it from digital libraries, such as the Monza Library for the Blind or the Italian Dyslexia Association. However, if bureaucracy slows down the process, it's better to give up and do it ourselves to avoid wasting time;
4. As a last resort, acquire the file from the paper manual. If you are following a student throughout the school year, you can choose to acquire only the parts of the book that are needed at the time, in collaboration with the teacher. This way, you will acquire only the parts of the book actually used.

Note: Acquiring the digital file should be an operation completed in 1-3 days.

Now let's look at the most common electronic formats and how to handle them.

PDF files are very common documents. Biblos directly opens this file format and extracts the text. However, given the complexity of the PDF format, the layout of the extracted text may not be immediately usable and could have pagination and formatting imperfections.

If opening a PDF with Biblos doesn't yield good results:

1. Try using Adobe Reader, the free PDF reader, to extract decent text;
2. If the PDF is copy-protected, try using decryption and/or conversion Software (many Online services offer this);
3. If the PDF consists of images, acquire the PDF using OCR Software (the same Software used for paper acquisition);
4. If the PDF is purchased Online and DRM-protected, try conversion using Adobe Digital Edition and/or attempt decryption with specialized tools.

Note: Please keep in mind that I am not advising the decryption of an electronic document for the purpose of illegally distributing it to third parties. In personal need situations, where it is essential to have a usable and accessible electronic copy, I simply believe it is fair to attempt to access a purchased product that cannot be used. Common sense would suggest that publishers should recognize these needs and act accordingly, but often they do not.

EPUB files are other widely used electronic books, more common in literature than in educational textbooks. This document format can be opened with Biblos as long as it doesn't have DRM protection. If the file has DRM protection, you can try opening and converting it using Adobe Digital Edition, or you can use other tools to remove the protection.

ODT files cannot be opened directly with Biblos. However, this is a document format from Open Office Software. Open Office is a free office suite. You can install Open Office and convert the document into a format that Biblos can open, such as RTF, DOC, or simply copy-paste the content from one Software to another.

Microsoft Word files can also be opened with Biblos, provided that a compatibility package from Microsoft is installed. The package can be found on the Microsoft website or downloaded from this site (check the download section).

The good old copy-paste often solves the problem. If you can open a file with any Software, you can try copy-pasting its content into a new Biblos document. For example, you can copy-paste data from an Excel spreadsheet directly into Biblos, or copy-paste content from the Internet.

As a last resort, if the electronic book cannot be found, turn on the Scanner and acquire the book from paper. It may seem like a difficult task, but usually, it can be completed in one or two hours.

To acquire the book, you need OCR Software. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. The most well-known and widely used OCR today is Abbyy FineReader. Depending on the book, scan it page by page and transfer it digitally. The OCR Software will recognize the text.

After acquiring the book, it's helpful to save the digital document in a format that can be immediately opened with Biblos, such as RTF format.

OCR recognition inevitably produces errors based on various factors, such as the quality of the pages, the positioning of the pages in the scanning area, and the complexity of the page layout. The scanning and recognition work should be done as well as possible to achieve a final result with a low error rate.

Once you have the digital book that can be opened with Biblos, you can format it and arrange the layout, or if you prefer, print it in Braille as it is. The formatting and layout of a Braille book are topics I have partially addressed in previous articles; I will discuss them again soon.

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