| On this Page | Filed elsewhere |
|---|---|
Source: notes file
Date: 18 Mar 2003
File name: S10843
Keywords: punctuation
This text contains punctuation marks &lsemicolon; &punctel: &lpunctel; correctly applied by apex. There are many virgules (/) also correctly captured, but also characters which look like half slashes have been captured as simple commas – is this ok?
PFS: The questions I asked myself were: (1) is there a 'real' comma in the book with which the half-slash forms an opposition? And (2) if there is, is it feasible to look at all the characters captured as "," and change some of them to something else?
From a quick look at several pages, it looks to me as though the half slash varies in size a bit, from something comma-like to something less so, but there are no true commas anywhere. Is that your opinion too? If so, I'd call the second question moot, regard the half-slashes as a local variant of comma, and leave the book as captured.
Source: notes file
Date: 29 Sep 2004
File name: S14987
Keywords: punctuation
&punc; was being used in the middle of words when the hyphen was missing in a line break, e.g. ex&punc;cluded instead of ex|cluded, or ex+cluded. I wasn't sure how this would impact on searchability, so I changed them all to +.
PFS: In general, we index punctuation as equivalent to a space and | and + as equivalent to null. So using &punc; within a word would have the effect of turning it into two words for purposes of searching, i.e. ex&punc;cluded could be searched for as 'ex' and as 'cluded' but not as 'excluded' (whereas ex|cluded and ex+cluded would both index as 'excluded'). So I think you did the right thing, even at the cost of a little precision with respect to whether the hyphen is really there or not.
Source: notes file
Date: 10 Feb 2004
File name: S15383
Keywords: punctuation
Full stops are actually small crosses, but I assume it is ok to capture them as is.
PFS: Yes, the little cross-shaped full stops are conventionally transcribed as simply a variant form of "."
Source: notes file
Date: 13 Oct 2004
File name: Wp2004
Keywords: punctuation
There are about 10 examples of French printed with a space between the elided article and the noun, e.g. l' une. Is this a typographical convention of the time? I didn't delete these spaces because it seemed to be consistently done.
PFS: Since it has no effect whatever on searching, if it is consistently spaced this way in the book, might as well leave it.
Source: notes file
Date: 5 Jun or 6 May 2004
File name: Ws5504
Keywords: punctuation, GAP
Long dashes (on pages 43, 83, 84) captured as <GAP DESC="blank">. Changed to —.
PFS: These are 'ellipsis' dashes, of the sort, "I learned much from Mr. B----". Actual example:
<HEAD>Vpon — his Picture Prefixt to his Almanack.</HEAD>
Though these certainly do represent bits that are deliberately 'left blank', we've tended, as Amanda indicates, to treat these as dashes rather than as blanks, the latter being reserved for blanks intended to be filled in, as in a legal form or the facsimile of a legal form.
Source: notes file
Date: 01/11/05
File name: tech/S5996
Keywords: ligature
A great job by the keyer of this difficult book – early blackletter, badly printed on the Continent by printers who probably didn't know English, and a bad microfilm to boot. There are oddities such as a "ct" ligature where we need the ampersand; I let those stand.
PFS: We've seen ct ligatures for amps before, but rarely, and always in books that showed other signs of poor, ignorant, or hasty printing. We've treated them as typos – i.e. let them stand – though I suppose one could argue that they are intentional substitutions for & and should be treated as variant forms of &. I'm not too persuaded by this argument.
Source: notes file
Date: 01/11/05
File name: tech/S5996
Keywords: punctuation
The book I am currently proofing has a great many hyphenated compounds, e.g. Gospel-Testimony, New-Creation, Gospel-spirit, and so on. These occur throughout the text, and where they occur across lines they have been captured, as we would expect, with a |, so Gospel|Testimony, New|Creation, etc. I can correct the ones in the sample and the most common ones I could search for, but I suppose there is no way of catching them all. Is it worth correcting all that I can or should I leave them as | for consistency's sake?
PFS: I don't think consistency is important: words divided by "|" are always candidates for selective correction to "-".
Not knowing how big the book is, it is hard for me to judge how practical it would be to change the "|"s to "-"s as appropriate throughout. I wonder, though: are the second elements of the real compounds usually capitalized? If so, could you change all the "|"s followed by an upper-case letter to "-" and get most of them that way? Perhaps supplemented by some of the more popular compounds? And ignore the rest?