Footnotes should not be a problem for DP, we handle them all the time. Arabic is another question. An html edition could certainly be made, with the help of someone who knows arabic to do those transcriptions, and a transcriber's note added that to view the arabic text, an arabic font must be installed. An ascii text would just be plaintext of course and therefore incomplete, but there could be a transcriber's note in that edition too, pointing the reader to the html edition for the complete text. Many at DP are not scared by the thought of a scholarly work or making faithful renditions of them. Some even relish the challenge. With the collaboration of a speaker of Arabic, whether someone at DP or elsewhere, such a project could be reliably done at DP.

On DP, la_joconde

On PG, Melissa Er-Raqabi (you may search my name at pgdp.net. Some of my recent uploads for Black History Month are non-fiction works with transcriber's notes. Higher project numbers are obviously more recent.)

--Melissa

Gardner Buchanan <gbuchana@rogers.com> wrote:

Hi all,

So after all the enthusiastic chatter about this in December, I'm
a little surprised two months later to find myself the first mover,
but here I am. I splashed out $12 for a facsimile edition of the
1829 Lee translation from Amazon, and yesterday I got hold of it.
I've submitted it for clearance and will do the scans as time
permits. I intend to push the scans into a DP project versus trying
to handle it myself. There will be difficulty however: this is a
scholarly translation and is full of footnotes, pronunciation
notation and is stuffed with arabic passages. Have a look at a
sample here:

http://unixcomputer.net/new-photo/cd/p12.gif

Anyone got ideas or suggestions for handling this sort of material?

See you,

On 04:04:10 Holden McGroin wrote:
> Gutenberg9443@aol.com wrote:
>> By the way, does ANYBODY know where we can get a public domain copy of
>> Ibn Batuta? I've had no luck finding one online. I even asked the king
>> of Saudi Arabia for a copy, but His Majesty didn't answer. The few
>> snippets I've seen are fascinating. He left his home to go on a haj, and
>> then kept going, spending 29 years travelling and writing fascinating
>> notes of where he went, namely everywhere you could get to without going
>> to Arctica, Antarctica, or the Americas.
>
> I have to agree with Anne. Every time I hear about Ibn Batuta's amazing
> travels, I feel the urge to read his writings. Is there any chance we
> could get them online as part of Gutenberg's collection?

============================================================
Gardner Buchanan
Ottawa, ON FreeBSD: Where you want to go. Today.
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