Book People Archive

Re: Why proofed and formatted digital text?

I missed the beginning of this discussion, but I have a couple thoughts:

1.  Having an electronic text is useful:

Electronic text is, and probably always will be, cheaper to store and
transmit than electronic images.

Electronic text allows searching

Electronic text allows reformatting and other useful transformations
impossible with images.  As an extreme example I'm particularly
interested in, an e-text of the OED (first ed.) could serve as a base
to create an entirely new dictionary (in fact, it did--unfortunately
the e-text has not been made public).

2.  Having electronic images is useful:

Old typographical conventions are interesting.

The finest printers made their pages into art.  Some would adjust type
in subtle ways to best communicate the meaning of the text.

Images don't have OCR and proofreading errors, and don't miss any subtle
points.

3.  Marked up e-text is better than plain e-text.  Some formatting is
more important than other formatting when producing an e-text.  If the
e-text is marked carefully with information about font, type size,
hyphenation, and significant spacing, it's easy for someone to come in
later and format the text in various ways, including making it closely
match the original.  Sometimes this ideal cannot be attained: spacing
in particular can be difficult to judge.  But I think the goal in any
case should be to leave things open to the future.

4.  I believe Distributed Proofreaders does a lot of great work, but I
think some of its policies are misguided, because they discard
information in the original text.  My philosophy is that the primary
goal of PG should be creating texts that precisely record every
significant element of each text, and its secondary goal should be
producing e-texts to read.  DP asks proofreaders to join hyphenated
words when seemingly appropriate: I think that task (as well as page
joining) should be left to post-processing, leaving the original
formatting available.

Just adding a bit of wood to this fire.

David