Robert Shimmin wrote:
This is just off the top of the stack of projects I would like to put through DP, but hold off on because they contain elements I consider presently unmanageable.
I don't see any problem with this. The text inside the wheel can easily be encoded in TEI and the whole thing can be added as illustration. OTOH if you want to get fancy you can encode the wheel in SVG and embed the SVG in TEI. Yes, you _can_ and we _already_ support that. If the browser groks SVG, the SVG code will be rendered by the browser, if not a pre-rendered image will be displayed instead. So it seems to me, that SVG/TEI is an even better choice than SVG/XHTML, because it saves you the trouble to create the fallback image manually. Thinking ahead, on the day when all PG TEI files will be stored in an XML database your readers will be able to do some fancy queries like: "show me all the texts which reference the date: Feb 24". If you have encoded the date like this: <date value="1555-02-24" rend="italic"><name reg="Matthias, St.">S. Mathies</name> day</date> the user will find your text. In a HTML file it will not find that date (not even the Saint).
Today, if I could figure out a good way to handle it, I would write some styling for it, submit it, and be done with it. Tomorrow, I will have to bug some element of the PG bureaucracy to patch my styling into their code, which it may not be compatible with, or may disagree with their notions of markup elegance.
Wrong. If you want to do your project in TEI, fine. Into the bargain you'll get HTML, TXT and PDF output from a single file, and more formats will follow. If you want to stick to the status quo, also fine. You'll have to do HTML and TXT manually and will nearly double your work and the work of the maintainers but you'll get a slightly better-looking text (in your opinion, that is). Sadly, people today take more pride in a good-looking text than in an error-free and usable one. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org