Re: Potential Gutenberg signout

> This Gutenberg ASCII transcription appears to have the page numbers of the
> orginal source publication.

In some books page numbers are very important (e.g. A facsimile of the dead
sea scrools or some other manuscripts), and this will need to be faced when
we get round to writing a new DTD, although in that case it may be better to
use a DTD such as TEI.

In this case though the page numbers are really discardable for the reasons
you mention.

However the Gutenberg blurb instructucts us to make faithful copies of the
Etext! In fact the 'page' element was designed to be used for places where
you wanted to retain the page numbering. Just enclose the page number in the
'page' element, (it would have been better named 'pagenum') and then when
you use your style sheet you can either declare it as a block element, or as
display:none. :>)

If there are just occasional page numbers it is better assume that these are
retained in error when the page was ocred, and to just eliminate them
(making note of the fact you have done this in markupblurb).

I leave it up to you which course you adopt!

The Etexts vary a lot in quality. The Kipling 1vol set that I have just
finished marking up is a mess in places, and really needs to be rescanned. I
adopted the later course. In marking up the 'Scarlet letter' i am adopting
the former!

Frank


----- Original Message -----
From: Terence de giere <terence(at)humanfactors.com>
To: Frank Boumphrey <bckman(at)ix.netcom.com>
Cc: <dms(at)zetnet.co.uk>; <hwg-gutenberg(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Friday, February 25, 2000 6:47 PM
Subject: Re: Potential Gutenberg signout


> Frank ---
>
> I have been **thinking** of signing out Robert Louis Stevenson's "The
> Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", but have been short of free
time.
>
> This text has a property I have not seen in other Gutenberg documents -
page
> numbers.
>
> This Gutenberg ASCII transcription appears to have the page numbers of the
> orginal source publication. The bookfrag.dtd has an element <page> which
> appears to be for page header related information or some other page
related
> info, since it is not a container for paragraphs etc., but I am not sure
it
> is suited for page numbers. I think it would be helpful at some point to
> have some additional description of the elements in the DTD
>
> This is an editorial question. Page numbers on the Web are not really
> necessary yet, and printing an XML file in a publishing system, or having
> CSS eventually paginate, would likely renumber pages depending on the
final
> target medium,  but I feel altering the text also removes some
information,
> such as how the source book or magazine was orginally paged.
>
> Can an element <pagenum> or <origpagenum> be added to the bookfrag DTD to
> cover this situtation, or shall I just make a custom extended DTD just for
> this situation, or eliminate the numbers from the text? I think it would
> better to not have a proliferation of DTDs. If we used <origpagenum> this
> would retain the info but could be surpressed in CSS so it wouldn't show
and
> allow an XML system to generate appropriate page numbers for other kinds
of
> presentation systems using another method. This would also free <pagenum>
> for use with a current format system, if someone wanted to use it.
>
> Terence de Giere
> Human Factors International, Inc.
>

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