[posted] REPosted(#652, Johnson)

[John Mark Ockerbloom]

Just a quick check on this one (and a few other reposts I've seen lately):
is it no longer Gutenberg policy to require
a plain vanilla ASCII version, even if the text is in English?

(I gather
the requirement was dropped a while ago for non-English works, since the ASCII
often isn't very useful, but it generally is for English versions even
if the occasional stray accent mark gets dropped or an mdash changed into
hyphens.)

For what it's worth, the policy is still mentioned at various points on
the Gutenberg site, such as

 
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:General_FAQ#G.17._Why_is_Project_Gutenberg_so_set_on_using_Plain_Vanilla_ASCII.3F

Unicode is pretty common nowadays, but there are still sometimes problems
with it on older systems, or when files are interchanged over the network
or across systems with different assumptions about character encoding.
So ASCII's nice to have if it doesn't represent a significantly degraded
format.  (It's possible to automatically produce an ASCII version from a Unicode
UTF-8 file, using standard normalization, so it shouldn't require much extra
work.)

John


On 01/31/2013 04:59 PM, David Price wrote:
> Corrections have been made in this file and it has been updated with the new
> header, removed from its old address in etext96, and filed under the
> new directory system.  A picture and Unicode has been provided.
>
>
>
>
> Rasselas, by Samuel Johnson                                                652
>    [Editor: Henry Morley]
>    [Subtitle: Prince of Abyssinia]
>    [Link: http://www.gutenberg.org/6/5/652 ]
>    [Updated edition of: etext96/rslas10h.htm]
>    [Files: 652-0.txt; 652-h.htm]
>
>
>
>
> All the best,
> David,
> England, cool, breezy and very damp