On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 1:39 AM, Greg Newby <gbnewby@pglaf.org> wrote:

I agree that First Folio is problematic. Otherwise, I don't have a
basis for a preference. Actually, I don't even know the was used
our #100 (http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/100/pg100.txt), and would
be curious to know.

For Shakespeare, like other plays, the main idea is to make it far
easier to create custom versions for each player/part (plus stage
direction). The markup mentioned above would also make it easy to
have a computer-based "minus one" performance, in which a live human
performer would read his parts, in the midst of a computer-generated
play troup. (This type of thing is already done with MIDI and musical
scores, for musical performances.) It would also make it trivial to
do speaker-based text analysis or other research.

Let me talk to the PPers, but I think we can also make something that is out of the box useful as well... an HTML edition with some light javascript menu hidden in the corner perhaps that'll toggle a 40% mask over all but one part or such. Or just highlight the specific part in yellow. :) It gets slightly tricky in a complete edition (detecting which play you are in and only displaying the current characters, remembering the last choice, etc.) Chrome, forex, restricts cookies in local copies of HTML, but it might allow HTML5 Web storage.. hmm.

Last time I checked, though, javascript support was inconsistent (at best) to non-existent in the mobile reader space[0]... the only way I could see to make it work is to color code the parts (for color devices) or part-specific versions with tweaked formatting (a PITA to keep maintained, even with scripts).

More importantly, it would give us a much cleaner complete Shakespeare!

So we want this one kept together and not broken up into individual plays? Okay. I'm never quite sure how that gets decided.

-Bob

[0] Not to mention the different input methods... a lot of the older e-ink devices have no touch screen or mouse equivalents, and are strictly menu based because of the slow refresh.