>what?  the d.p. process requires the introduction of errors?

Yes, in the encoding of m-dash, ellipses, etc.

>no, you most certainly failed to follow those instructions...

>   http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Volunteers'_FAQ#V.94._What_should_I_do_with_italics.3F

First of all, again, if this is important to PG then why do they not properly index it to the PG site’s search engine?

Secondly, you refuse to read the immediately preceding section FAQ#V.93 which makes it clear that different volunteers have different priorities about what “plain text” means and how they will be willing to support it and will be using different automatic conversion tools and that some of the volunteers (read: me) will be paying no weight to the desire of other volunteers to make tools to do “automatic prettyprinting” from the “plain text” whereas other volunteers (yourself) are willing to insert “ugliness” into the plain text (their words not mine) in order to better support prettyprinters such as you are proposing.

Finally, you and others at PG are forgetting to heed the closing words given there:

Getting a text on-line is the important thing; which choices you [meaning me] make in doing so is a matter of detail.

The choices *I* make as a volunteer are to put my time and effort into doing ONE markup as well as I can namely HTML, and as little time and effort as possible on TXT files -- because for all the arguments raised here I think TXT is a loser and a no-win situation for the volunteer transcriber – no matter HOW one makes the unhappy tradeoffs *required* by TXT someone will end up unhappy and start “beefing” at you.  And the reason that PG is not willing to provide an automatic tool to reduce HTML to TXT is because they know that then THEY not the volunteer transcribers will be the unhappy recipients of these kinds of diatribes.