I.d like to make a comment on the problem of document structure.
I essentially agree with the comments made by Mike Freeman, hoping
that I understood all correctly.
I am always wondering how important many people conslider the
layout of a document would be. It is certainly true that the layout
normally reflects the logical structure of a document and I can imagine
that many sighted people consider this two aspects as beeing exactly
the same. We have a similar situation with GUIs where people consider
icons as being the same as the logical entities they represent.
I think that blind people are used to work and think in a much more
abstract way. It is not important to know where an icon or button
may be located within a window. It is important to know which
functions are available at a given step.
The same applies for documents. It is certainly more difficult to read
a document when the original layout is partially or totally lost.
but we have learnt to live with, specially since we use scanners.
But it is true that too much loss of layout information may make
it difficult to understand the meaning of a document. I had that problem
afeter having scanned a text book and noticed that the decolumnisation
process had separated titles from the text of the paragraphs. this is
a particularly bad example but it illustrates the limits of
understanding "unstructured" text.
But I would still be happy to have a conversoin program for PostScriopt
even if it would lose the text structure.
Let's do the practically useful things before the theoretically
correct things.
Regards
Arnold Schneider
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