Wearing my Whitewasher hat (I've got a producer's hat around here somewhere, too <g>), I'll answer some of the issues raised below, but I won't argue about them. I leave that to others. Q1: are your digitizers free to ignore the italics if they like? A1: They can, but they'll be referred to the PG Volunteers' FAQ and How-to article(s), and asked to make the necessary corrections. Q2: are your digitizers free to ignore any rule they dislike? A2: Some rules/principles can be ignored in specific cases, e.g. line lengths can exceed 75 characters for highly structured material such as tables, poetry, and such-like. There may be other occasions for bending the rules, but A1 above should be kept in mind. Q3: are digitizers free to make the .txt files as bad as they choose? A3: See A1 It is to be hoped that submitters realize that a plain text file can and should carry almost as much information as any other format. Obviously, they can't carry illustrations or typeface info, but they can certainly carry all the words (in the vast majority of books, the only things that really count) and most, if not all, of the standard and near-standard emphasis indicators (e.g. underscores for italics). ----- Original Message ----- From: Bowerbird@aol.com To: gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org ; Bowerbird@aol.com Sent: Friday, September 25, 2009 2:31 PM Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: let's wind this down jim said:
Yes, in the encoding of m-dash, ellipses, etc.
i was being sarcastic, jim. just like you, i have railed about the way that d.p. (mis)handles things like em-dashes and ellipses.
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?
i dunno. you'll have to ask p.g., not me. but i agree their instructions suck. i get the impression that they don't even want individual digitizers to do books any more. they want to channel the labor over to d.p., which would be fine, except the d.p. workflow wastes _so_ much volunteer time and energy.
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.
you can try and do all the doubletalk that you want, jim, but the fact remains that there is a policy, and it is clear:
Underscores are now the effective standard for italics in PG texts.
your .txt version failed to meet the standard, jim. face it.
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.
do you think this gives you the ok to ignore the italics? not only did your .txt version fail to meet the standard, but now you're telling us you don't have to meet that? how about we get a ruling from the p.g. people on this? are your digitizers free to ignore the italics if they like? are your digitizers free to ignore any rule they dislike?
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
and because you're putting so little time and effort into your .txt files, they are coming out as inferior. again, how about a ruling from the p.g. powers-that-be? are digitizers free to make the .txt files as bad as they choose? i will keep asking this question until it is answered, so don't think that you can ignore it and it will just go away. -bowerbird _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d