Copying the characters on a book page is only part of turning it into text. A small number may point to a note, and an explanation may sit beside a Chinese-character term or an English expression. If everything is run into the surrounding sentence, the boundary between the author's text and the explanation becomes difficult to follow.
I worked on transcription and checking while volunteering to prepare electronic books for blind readers. Transcription means carrying the original text into another form. Alongside the words, I set rules for paragraphs, notes, formulas and passages that could not be read clearly.
Leaving a route back to an unclear character
For a doubtful character, I asked for the source page to be enlarged and the surrounding text checked. Context could help narrow the possibilities, but it was not enough to confirm a character that remained unreadable on the page. Marking that uncertainty left a place to return to during review.
Clipped sentences needed the same care. Keeping the visible text and marking what was missing preserved the distinction between a cropped source page and an omission introduced during transcription. Completing the sentence with plausible new wording would erase that distinction.
I used recognition, transcription and editing tools with a further review pass instead of treating their first output as finished. That pass checked page order and paragraph boundaries, then returned to marked uncertainties and omissions on the source page. A fluent-looking result still needed those checks.
Notes did not follow one rule across every assignment
Footnotes sit near the main text; endnotes are collected later in the book. How they enter a transcription depends on the assignment. In one workflow I corrected the inclusion of endnotes because they were to be excluded. In another, I specified inline note markers such as [주1] and [주2]. Those were different instructions for different work, not a universal rule about keeping or removing notes.
I also pointed out explanations beside Chinese-character and English expressions and requested parentheses to distinguish them from the surrounding text. Recognising the letters was one task; carrying across their role on the page was another.
For formulas and parentheses, the grouping mattered as well as the symbols. A closing parenthesis and the placement of an explanation can change how the same characters are read. Paragraph boundaries and the attachment point of a note therefore remained part of the checking instructions.
Revisions, recorded activity and questions that remain
When an output departed from the rules, I identified the mark or treatment that needed correction and requested another pass. The same instructions had to carry into the next batch, and sometimes I asked for only the affected pages to be returned. Writing down a rule did not establish that every page had followed it.
On 29 July 2026, I obtained a volunteer-activity confirmation that includes electronic-book production.
I do not have individual readers' usage records, and have not measured reading time saved or the remaining error rate in the transcriptions. To find out how separating notes and marking unreadable passages helps a reader, the next check would follow how they navigate those paragraphs and notes with their assistive technology.