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Transcribing Instructions for Preparing Etexts

Our mission is to produce continuous texts for reading, rather than to reproduce page images. At the same time, however, we want to preserve as much of the flavor of the original text as possible. The guidelines are in order from most important to least important. If you find the guidelines confusing, simply type the text, separating paragraphs by blank lines, and we can add any other formatting that is required after you send it to us.

1. Preserve paragraphing by separating paragraphs with a blank line.

2. Do not include leading blanks at the beginning of a paragraph. Left justify all text.

3. Do not preserve line breaks. Preserve hyphens in words crossing line boundaries only if the word is ordinarily hyphenated in the text.

4. Preserve hyphens in words that do not cross line breaks, even if they are not hyphenated in modern usage (for example, "to-day").

5. Preserve spelling, even when it seems antiquated (for example, "labour" instead of "labor"). If you see an obvious misspelling or typographical error, include a note in square brackets about the change that you think should be made. For example, [should be . instead of ,]

6. As a general rule, preserve punctuation. For quotes, use straight quotes (both single and double) in all cases.

7. Put each line of a poem on a separate line, left-justified. Separate stanzas by a blank line.

8. Include the title on a line all by itself. Put the title in mixed case, even if it is all capitalized in the original text. Do not leave a blank line after the title.

9. At the place in the text where a page break occurs, put the page number on a line all by itself. The page number should be before the text of the page, even though the page number in a printed book is typically at the bottom of the page. If a page break occurs at a paragraph break, put one blank line, followed by a line containing the page number all by itself.

10. For a double dash or long dash, use the em dash (—), with no spaces on either side of it. For example, do this, "him—for shame—but" rather than this, "him — for shame — but".

11. Preserve special characters if at all possible. This includes letters with accents. Use character entities or numeric entities for characters that you don't have a symbol for on your keyboard. Refer to Latin-1 Character Set Definition for the numeric and character entities that you can use to cause special characters to display.

12. Preserve italics by bracketing italic text with <I> and </I> tags. Example: <I>text to be italicized</I>

13. Preserve bold text by bracketing bold text with <B> and </B> tags. Example: <B>text to be in bold face type</B>

14. Put the first word of the first paragraph of a chapter on a line all by itself. Do not capitalize the whole first word of a chapter, even if it is capitalized in the original text. Capitalize only the first letter of the first word.

15. When a single quote and double quotes appear right next to each other, insert a &nbsp; (non-breaking space) between them for readability.

16. Do not include page headers and page footers.

17. Be careful not to conclude a line with a hyphen or an em dash (—) unless it is the last line in a paragraph. If you do, unwanted white space will occur after the hyphen or em dash.

18. Preserve text in smallcaps by including text as follows: <? SmallCaps("text") ?> . Example: <? SmallCaps("Text in mixed case to be displayed as smallcaps") ?>