Hi Roger On 2012-09-23, Roger wrote:
I thought further about the proofing rounds at DP. The original proposal was to ask that proofers not clothe eol hyphens and dashes. I believe there would be other exceptions, such as start of chapter capitalization that proofers are supposed to downcase. I'm not sure DP management or users will embrace these changes, especially when the proofer's work is not leading directly to a final product but only to a RTT.
Lack of DP engagement is definitely top of the list of things that will kill this idea stone dead. DP doesn't do change; we must accept that as an axiom. Therefore anything that we ask them to do must essentially be what they would do anyway -- the non-clothing of eol hyphens and dashes, I believe, is often done for LOTE, so we may just get away with that. Anything the RTT requires beyond that we will have to do ourselves -- hopefully there won't be too much.
David brought up a good counterexample: italics. I like the idea of capturing the text electronically beyond the scans themselves in an exact UTF-8 edition. But thinking it further, there are things the typesetter might have done that are not representable in UTF-8, italics being one example.
Marcello's position has been that PG produces new editions. He eschews facsimile editions that DP historically has tried to produce, matching the original as closely as possible, which is what the RTT is. Instead, he proposes RST. It's the only input format that is completely usable by epubmaker. RST cannot match the scan. It feels like Jon's RTT and Marcello's RST are both trying to be PG's master format.
I've shuffled these paragraphs together as they are related. I am absolutely not proposing RTT as a master format. The master format I am proposing is actually the MS, which, of course, encodes italics etc. just fine. The RTT is just an intermediate stage in the process of transforming the MS into "something else"; the RTT is only really useful in conjunction with the MS unless you are content to dispose of all formatting, such as in the case of diffing against the extant text to find scannos. What the "something else" should be is intentionally beyond the scope of the project because that argument will rage until doomsday. Lots of things work, and what works best is dependent on the nature of the text. Marcello's RST would likely be a common candidate, but that should not proclude Bowerbird from using the MS and RTT to do a ZML version. If politics necessitate, Marcello can host the RST on PG and Bowerbird can host the ZML on his site. Hopefully both Marcello and Bowerbird would agree that the MS and RTT make a good starting point for a transformation to their chosen formats. If not I need to work out how to make it so, or give it up.
Finally, Bowerbird has warned against proceeding and I respect his historical perspective. Can we avoid the mistakes of the past attempts?
I too respect Bowerbird's historical perspective, and what's more I don't know what the mistakes of the past were, so I can't avoid them. I can only try to keep things simple and uncontroversial. I have asked Bowerbird for specifics, and will happily abandon this idea if he comes up with something that cannot be mitigated against. Cheers Jon