What bowerbird failed (or didn't bother) to
mention was that using curly braces for page numbers and square brackets for
footnotes are practices that are documented in PG's Volunteers' FAQ (V.98, V.99,
V.103). As such, my "personal practice" is not an invention of
my own, but are PG-standard, documented, practices that I've adopted for my
projects.
Al
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, March 21, 2010 11:18
AM
Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: save those
pagenumber references
al said:
> My personal practice is
and
therein lies the rub.
the p.g. e-texts are rife with "personal
practice".
and the d.p. e-texts are soaking in it right now...
one
thing you have to know about pagenumbers is
some people need 'em and other
people hate 'em...
which means you have to have 'em, and you have
to
give people a way to shut them off... _totally_ off...
the
only way to do that is to establish a convention,
so viewer-app developers
can make everyone happy.
most "personal practice" implementations try
to walk
the tightrope between the two sides, and fail _both_,
in the
sense they don't do the _full_ job that the "pro"
people want pagenumbers
to do, but yet aren't nearly
as non-invasive as the "anti" people
reasonably want.
if a hundred different digitizers do it a hundred
ways
-- or a thousand digitizers do it a thousand ways --
nobody is
gonna end up happy; we'll all be miserable.
and face it, if both sides
are going to end up unhappy,
you might as well flip a coin and make one
side happy.
the only way to make it work is to do it _one_way_...
so
developers can target the convention successfully.
michael isn't going
to prescribe this remedy for p.g.
even if he tried, he probably would not
succeed, and
he has made it clear that he doesn't even want to try
and
do things like that, as per his basic philosophy...
nobody else has a
remote chance of success with p.g.
so alas, it is not to be.
but
perhaps it doesn't matter.
because it's becoming increasingly clear
that the only
cyberlibrary that's going to matter is the google one,
and
-- after a few missteps at the very beginning --
google has gotten pretty
smart about pagenumbers...
so whatever conventions they establish will
stick.
***
but, to answer the question...
gardner said:
> Is there any suggestion what
>
a formatted text-only book that
> retains page numbers
should look like?
> Is it reasonable to just sprinkle them
> into the text, maybe something like this:
there's
nothing difficult about the issue, technically.
you wouldn't want to
"sprinkle them" thoughtlessly,
but any number of _well-specified_conventions_
can
handle the tiny number of wrinkles that do crop up...
(tell me
if you want me to dredge my memory-bank
to catalog them, but there
seriously aren't too many.)
-bowerbird
_______________________________________________
gutvol-d mailing
list
gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org
http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d