Greg Newby wrote:
Jon Noring wrote:
Carlo wrote:
If TEI has to be used only semantically, then it is inadequate for PG needs. PG markup has to contain presentational elements, in such a way that one can obtain presentations "faithful to the original".
Is this a requirement that it be possible *without some manual work* to regenerate the typographic layout of the source document?
I have not heard this as a requirement. Of course, some eBook producers might believe it's valuable, and they are welcome to prepare their work to be "typographyically correct" (whatever that might mean to them).
My question was more rhetorical rather than inquisitive. The discussion shows there's different views on the issue of what we preserve, in a presentational sense, of the original source document. For me, only rarely must the typographic layout be reproduced in some manner (such as "poetry as visual art" and a few other rarities as have been brought out here.) And for this, I recommend using SVG rather than trying to use presentational markup plus CSS to effect the desired result in the digital text version. I've previously commented on eschewing tabs and spaces for poetry/verse used to preserve visual indentation (my view is to use structural or semantic markup instead -- and where poetry moves into the visual art realm, then use SVG.) Whether to preserve the "long-s" or not is more problematic, since where do we draw the line? For example, if we have an old Russian text, do we transliterate the character set to Latin? Of course we don't. Isn't the use of a "long-s" part of a variant character used at the time of publication? It is easy to auto-convert the Unicode equivalent of the 'long-s' character to an ordinary 's' (as it is for the German ess-tsett), but going the other way is much more difficult.
However, it *is* a requirement to automatically regenerate plain text and HTML (perhaps other formats as desired) from the XML.
Definitely! Both repurposeability and accessibility is vital. My view is that, as much as possible, make the final master digital content as agnostic with respect to presentation type as possible. And in the rare instances this is not possible, then use SVG, which when done right allows much better accessibility and repurposeability. If enough agree here, we might want to begin discussing how to integrate islands of SVG within the TEI framework. Jon Noring