Jon Noring writes:
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.
Yes, because that would be stupid and useless. The real question is if we have an old Russian text, do we convert the fitas and other letters that are strictly redundant and hence abandoned in modern Russian to their modern Russian equivalent? Most English editions convert the long-s, and I believe most Russian editions convert the old letters to the modern equivalents. Or how about the o with e above that was the written form of o-umlaut? Do we preserve that or convert it to the modern form? There's one book in DP that preserves it in the Unicode edition because umlauts were used in a brief section, but I don't know that it was more important than a change to Fraktur or bold. Again, modern German that was original printed with an o-e above is converted to umlauts when reprinted; the e above was encoded for people who wanted to use it with middle German to contrast with modern German.
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.
It depends. In English, most of the long-s usage is trivial to convert; if it's not at the end of a word, it's a long-s. Sometimes a long-s s combination is seen for ss, but that's consistent within one work generally. In German, it takes a dictionary lookup and there's one or two minor examples, comparable to the ones about Polish and polish in English, where it can't be automatically converted. But one question should be our readers. There's a lot of well-educated people who aren't familiar with the long-s; are we doing more good in keeping what's more a detail of the typography than the spelling at the cost of some of our readers? The vast majority of the editions I've seen that reprint pre-1800 English works or German works orginally printed in Fraktur in modern fonts do not use the long-s, even when preserving original spelling. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm