Re: Marking bold & italics in .txt (was Re: [gutvol-d] a few questions that i don't know the answer to)
On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 23:33:29 -0800, Greg Newby <gbnewby@pglaf.org> wrote:
On Thu, Nov 11, 2004 at 11:00:52PM -0500, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
second, for greg. people over at distributed proofreaders have reported that the f.a.q. here at project gutenberg do not state that styled text (specifically, italics and bold) be marked with underbars and asterisks in the text files. the understanding i have from you is that this has become the official policy of project gutenberg. if that's not the case, would you please inform people here? and if it _is_ the case, when you next update the f.a.q., could you include this policy? thank you.
Jim maintains the FAQ, and DP has their own style guides that sometimes vary for different texts. So, I'm not really the right guy to ask. I don't think there was agreement on how to handle bold & italics, but I do think everyone I heard from agreed it should be indicated somehow in plain text.
So, I don't think there is an official policy on handling bold & italics in plain text files. But if DP has an official policy I'm unaware of, then it should probably be reflected in the FAQ as a recommendation.
Sorry I don't know the current state on this, but perhaps Jim or some of the DP project managers can contribute the latest thinking.
Italics is well covered at http://gutenberg.net/faq/V-94 http://gutenberg.net/faq/V-95 About three years or so ago, 'most everyone settled on _underscores_ for italics, with a few holdouts for /slants/. CAPITALS, of course, are still represented in a lot of older texts, but I haven't seen anyone using them in a new text for quite some time. Compared to italics, bold as a method of emphasizing text, as opposed to bold as an incidental property of a heading, is relatively rare. Where bold does need to be rendered in plain text, the current most common usage (from DP) is *bold text*. There are times when it is appropriate to signify bold, but I have seen some texts coming from DP where it has been used unnecessarily -- mostly to indicate a sub-heading or chapter title in the book. In such a case, where a chapter title is clearly a chapter title and on a line by itself, there really is no need to mark it in the plain text version as having been bold face in the original. I think this practice comes from people pre-marking the text for later conversion to HTML, rather than any intent to clutter the plain text. jim
Jim Tinsley wrote:
Where bold does need to be rendered in plain text, the current most common usage (from DP) is *bold text*. There are times when it is appropriate to signify bold, but I have seen some texts coming from DP where it has been used unnecessarily -- mostly to indicate a sub-heading or chapter title in the book. In such a case, where a chapter title is clearly a chapter title and on a line by itself, there really is no need to mark it in the plain text version as having been bold face in the original. I think this practice comes from people pre-marking the text for later conversion to HTML, rather than any intent to clutter the plain text.
Actually, it is probably there from the OCR pre-processing and was never removed through all the rounds of proofing and post-processing... why I feel this is important enough of a distinction that I needed to make a post about ... I have no idea. I'm going to bed. Josh
participants (2)
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Jim Tinsley -
Joshua Hutchinson