On 19-Feb-2010 23:57, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
(because _your_ text will be discarded because you threw away info that people will want) is yet another (bigger) part of the equation.
you can mount a version of your work that doesn't throw away the important information, and then no one will have to re-do it,
I'm going to take this as a jumping off point for a more general question about whether pagination of a published edition, is worth saving. Obviously there is a range of opinion. I'll give you mine. What I believe, philosophically, I am shooting for is to capture the core content, and reject the details that have mainly to do with the medium of publication. So at the top level, I think the text itself and notions like block quotations, poetry layout, italics and stuff I keep. Stuff that is a function of the fact it was printed on little rectangles of paper -- hyphenation page numbering, line ends, I believe I do not have any use for. Maybe there are possible future uses of my text that would want the things that I left out. I tend to doubt that this could ever be very important. If I take for example what scholarly editions tend to do, they focus on the text, tend to combine information from different printings and editions, and winnow out and reject the artefacts of hyphenation and pagination. The seek out and highlight even small differences in the text, but go to pains to filter out hyphenation artefacts. In the grand scheme of things, there were undoubtedly interesting things in earlier versions of a book than what we have -- the author's manuscript, editors notes, even the setter's notes all would be very interesting things to have. But if I think what value I could get from having the author's manuscript I do not picture knowing the pagination or line endings of a longhand manuscript as being of foremost importance. Obviously others feel like preserving page numbers is worthwhile -- I see that most PG-Canada texts have this. As an individual contributor I do not feel that my time is best spent capturing and encoding that, and so I don't. And I am happy that PG finds my efforts acceptable despite this deficiency. I haven't done any sort of real research, but a quick look shows me that not many texts attempt to preserve line endings in any way. Preserving line endings seems quite unpopular. My question to the pagination-preservers is: what is the difference? Both hyphenation, line-endings and pagination are mainly artefacts of the physical medium -- one of width and the other of height. Bowerbird wants to keep both; I see no need to keep either. But what is the reasoning behind keeping one (pagination) and not the other? ============================================================ Gardner Buchanan <gbuchana@teksavvy.com> Ottawa, ON FreeBSD: Where you want to go. Today.