On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 6:13 AM, Jon Hurst <jon.a@hursts.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:
On 2012-09-23, David Starner wrote:
I don't see any value in that. Scans are a pain, and the only saving grace is that they accurately represent a physical printed edition.
The value in the MS is in its unequivocal nature. It says: "After much discussion amongst knowledgeable people, this, and only this, is what we at PG consider to be a version of this book. Everything else we publish is a derivation of this. If they don't match this, they are in error."
The value of scans is in their unequivocal nature. Once we've started editing the scans, then it's just another modern volunteer edition. I see no reason not to list our changes in an external text file. If it's small, then it's not a big deal. If it's large, then we aren't providing an authoritative version of the work, and if we're really using the best version of the work, there may be no way for us to provide an authoritative version of the work. I'm not arguing about having backing scans; merely that they should be the original unedited scans.
In example 1, I am in luck. PG has been adding definitive scans to the PG archives and Marcello has done a really cool interface. I note a difference with my version and the scan, so I report it... and the WW writes back saying that it is not actually a difference: it is just a typo that was corrected in the text and the definitive scan is actually the thing that is incorrect. So much for the definitive scan...
So much for the corrected typo! If there's disagreement on whether the book or the text is the typo, it's better to stick with the book. It's not a big deal to integrate the corrections file with this interface, and cases of this are likely to be vanishingly rare; most people are only going to be checking the file if they think they found something wrong in the text, in which case we should stick with the original.
The main point of RTT is that the phrase "let's make (X)HTML/TEI/RST/LaTeX/ZML (delete as appropriate) the PG master format" _will_, quite rightly, start an unproductive flame war. RTT is inferior to all these things by design,
I fail to see why an inferior format solves anything. And if I'm going to be start my work from the (X)HTML/TEI/RST/LaTeX/ZML edition instead of RTT, it's useless.
Your choice once you have, say, a ZML version available, might be to base your work on a transformation from ZML, but the RTT will hopefully have saved the person doing the ZML version a heap of work.
No, it won't have. The person doing the RTT will almost certainly be doing an ebook, and thus they will be the person making the ZML. Moreover, if nobody is working from the RTT, you've gained little. I don't see anyone rushing to send errata back to a version that's not even used by ebook creators. I'm not even sure how the errata is supposed to get to the ebooks in this model. As long as you get things done, the flame war doesn't matter. You can punt on the hard things, but any text dump that doesn't preserve easy necessary things like italics and superscript doesn't help me much at all. As a solitary producer, I might well be able to get better straight out of the OCR program. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.