Steve Thomas wrote:
Not to rain on your parade, but ... compare with my script for converting PG .txt to html on the fly:
http://isis.library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/pg-html/pg/etext03/ulyss12.txt
Some attempt at reformatting would be nice.
I'll take your text to show why I am opposed to purely automatic reformatting of text. Your text (in the 2nd paragraph) says: —Introibo Ad Altare Dei. where it should say —Introibo ad altare Dei. Capitalization rules for English titles should not be applied to Latin text were they are completely inadequate. Also: Amoroso Ma Non Troppo. Von Der Sirenen Listigkeit Tun Die Poeten Dichten. Und Alle Schiffe Brucken. Tete-A-Tete The missing accents combined with the erroneous capitalization make the last 2 examples a really outstanding example of text corruption. Its better IMO to present an ugly but correct text than a pretty but corrupted one. This is the reason I decided against purely automatic reformatting. N.B. I'm not against automatic reformatting (into TEI) and then proofing the text again.
Your cookie idea for remembering where you got to is a nice touch -- but this seems to be the only justification for splitting a work into 50-line segments. 50 seems completely arbitrary -- 25 would probably fit the whole page into my screen, so I wouldn't need to scroll. 200 -- or 2000 -- would save me clicking on Next Page so often.
That also could be stored in a preferences cookie. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org