Stating the obvious, lately we have been having a lot of heat about what I
will broadly describe broadly and hopefully without perceived prejudice as
"encoding choices" -- a subject which is often described [incorrectly] as
"file formats."
IE a volunteer transcriber, "at" PG or DP or somewhere else, using a
combination of OCR, blood, sweat and tears, and other "helpful" tools, makes
choices, independently or directed, about what and how to encode the
information which they see in that book, that which they feel is important
to record -- or that which they decide is unimportant and should not be
recorded.
At this point in time one or another persons on this forum immediately jumps
up and down and says "I have THE solution!"
I would like to suggest that any such proposed "solution" must include a
discussion and decision about what to actually encode, and what not to
encode, and I would also like to suggest that any proposed "solution"
[including those currently in use at PG and DP] should encode that which
that format chooses to encode *unambiguously.* IE if a particular format
and/or encoding scheme claims to encode a particular piece of information,
but does not do so unambiguously, then in fact it is NOT successfully
capturing that piece of information.
Below, as a reminder, is a list of things that various volunteers choose to
encode, or not encode, and which various encoding schemes support encoding
unambiguously, or which do not support encoding unambiguously.
To state the obvious: At least part of the problem is that the people on
this forum have wide DISAGREEMENT about which of the following items should
be encoded unambiguously, which is to say successfully, which should be
ignored, and which should be recorded ambiguously [???]. [I have cribbed a
lot of this from DP, but I could just have well cribbed it from the TEI
community, or most good books on typography]
As an example, and to start this throw-down, I will simply state from my
point of view that "how discolored with age the paper stock is" is really
NOT an important thing to encode from my point of view! [Since I would
rather see a representation of the book "as-published" not "as-found"]
PS: defining "unambiguous coding" means: "those who propose that file format
or encoding can write a computer program to extract that particular piece of
information from their files 100% successfully 100% of the time without
error and without heroic coding efforts."
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book-title
author
illustrator
translator
publisher
publication date
glyph
paragraph
blockquote
poem-stanza
poem-line
poem-indentation-level
epigrams
thought break
page break
horizontal rule
spelling (choice of)
capitalization
bold
italic
underline
small-cap
gesperrt
illustrations
color of paper stock
how discolored with age that paper stock is
captions
drop-cap
alternative font use
distinctive font size changes
author-specific eccentricities in use of punctuation
author-specific eccentricities in use of spelling
nationality of spelling, punctuation and/or style of typesetting
tables
superscripts
subscripts
page numbers
line numbers
page references
page numbers
TOC
index
Preface
left-vs-right alignedness
justification
letter
signature
salutation
"foreign" words
language (of original work)
language (of this publication)
language (of a subsection of this publication)
handedness (of punctuation)
Foreword
Introduction
Front Material
Prologue
Epilogue
Appendix
References
Conclusion
Glossary
Summary
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Advertisements
Front Matter
Back Matter
Ex Biblio
decorative marks
decorative rules
printers' [stock] art
illuminated-letter
black-letter
first-letter-color
punctuation
spacing
line-breaks
foot-note
side-note
end-note
all-caps
chapter title
chapter subtitle
section title
section subtitle
hyphenation
half-spaces
contractions (form of)
