hugh said:
However, on page breaks, I have for some time (I'm my own webmaster) adopted the practice, in putting books (not short articles) on our website, of inserting the page numbers of the original in {curly brackets} which I generally don't use for other purposes. This not only identifies the page from the original one is reading (helpful both for checking and for bibliographic reference) and, because it is surrounded by {curly brackets} is easy to search for without finding other materials.
that's a pretty good strategy. it's still fairly obtrusive on the reading experience -- we need to recognize most users don't want to see this info -- but i could live with that method if it became the policy. what i would do, with my viewer-program, is to "vanish" them; that is, i'd display them only if the user specified to show them, and even then, i'd move them out to the margins to be discreet... what i suggest, instead, for a standard for project gutenberg, would be to use some of the under-32 ascii-characters to indicate the various types of page-breaks, so they would be invisible to an ordinary end-user with an ordinary text-viewer, while a savvy viewer-program would be able to discern them and show them to the occasional reader that might want them. also -- and i'm sorry i haven't mentioned this up until now -- i think it's very important that these page-break indicators not gunk up the text. again, for the average user, they will be a nuisance in most cases, and we need to minimize that nuisance. for instance, consider the current practice in the .html versions coming out of distributed proofreaders with page-number info. even when the page-number display is moved out to the margin, with c.s.s., they are still there right in the middle of the text! so when a person selects a range of text including a page-number, and copies it out of the browser-window, boom, that page-number is sitting right in the middle of it. and it's a hassle to get rid of it. (and, as far as i know, that's the case even when you have elected to "turn off" display of the page-numbers, but i could be wrong on that.) one of the basic aspects of project gutenberg e-texts has always been that you could easily copy out the text and repurpose it, and i believe that is an important asset to protect... -bowerbird