Quote:
Originally Posted by elibrarian
This is to some extent language specific. IIRC j.p.s. is norwegian, and I would suspect they have the same "peculiarities" as we do in danish:
– Only one type of dash (you can use en- or em- as you please, as long as you use the same type consistently), [...] (The emdash-like character sometimes used to signify dialog is a "horizontal bar", unicode ― – if correctly coded).
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So, Danish also uses a quotation dash?
Thanks. I wasn't aware of that.
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Side Note: Be careful using the HORIZONTAL BAR (U+2015) in ebooks, there are some issues.
See the discussion back in:
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GrannyGrump
I know precisely what you mean. I don't use their (maddening) markup code, but I do like the idea of killing italics on currently common words (alibi, role, cafe, etc); killing hyphens on words we don't hyphenate any more (apologies to purists, but to-day with a hyphen is just irritating to me), and a bunch of other simplifications they use.
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How dare you!
What if you resumed writing that on your résumé to-day? Who would hire you after they learn the rôle you played in devolving society by removing essential hyphens and italics?
Will you coöperate with the language-/book-police when they come to arrest you?
You know who I won't be reëlecting to lead the Ebook-Editing Club to-morrow? GrannyGrump! When do I want her gone? To-day!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
My aim was to show that most of the argumentative post on this subject in the last few years misses the point with the focus on a mostly hypothetical concept TTS & Accessibility and standards invented by people focused on building web browsers.
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The advantages/use-cases are not hypothetical. They are real AND being used in the current day.
And, there are also MANY other languages/cases where emphasis (and italics) are handled completely differently.
Even see Braille:
Quote:
Formatting marks
Braille has several formatting marks, sometimes called "composition signs", "register marks", or "indicators", which have no one-to-one correspondence with printed English. These are the number sign ⟨⠼⟩, the letter sign ⟨⠰⟩, the capital sign ⟨⠠⟩, the italic sign (or more accurately the emphasis sign) ⟨⠨⟩, and the termination sign ⟨⠠⠄⟩ (written cap–apostrophe). These immediately precede the sequence (word or number) they modify, without an intervening space.
[...]
The emphasis (italic) sign marks emphatic formatting, equivalent to printed italic, bold, underlined, and small-capital text.[29] A single italic sign emphasizes the entire word (or number). For two or three emphasized words, each takes a separate marker. For longer texts, a doubled marker is placed before the first word, and the end of the emphasis is indicated by marking the final emphasized word with a single italic sign.
When the capitalization or emphasis does not span the entire word, the beginning and end is marked with a hyphen.
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And, on emphasis in other languages, see my post from 2021:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tex2002ans
Auto-Translation
Many languages don't have such a thing as "italics"... and they represent emphasis differently.
For example, emphasis in:
- Arabic
- extra lines above/below, different fonts, or extra stretched-out lettering.
- Hebrew
- bolder, underline, or larger gaps between letters (letter-spacing).
- Chinese/Japanese/Korean
- extra dots/symbols around characters.
Imagine you were a Japanese reader, and after an English->Japanese translate, every single word in your book titles had extra emphasis dots placed on it. That's not correct.
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Side Note: For extra info on emphasis in other languages, I just ran across this great talk:
She mostly shows examples of Hebrew, but she also quickly skims over Cyrillic (Russian) + Hangul (Korean).
Side Note #2: Remember:
European-based languages tend to have an italics font + emphasis as italics... but the rest of the world doesn't.
And it's only by a quirk of history that both italics/emphasis look the same (in English).
Not all languages are like that!
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I strongly recommend reading up on Internationalization.
BILLIONS of people have joined the internet + read/write/speak non-Latin languages + use computers in alternate ways, which is why Accessibility+proper markup has gotten even more important than ever before.
Look at all the tools I mentioned with HTML lang alone:
Many of those enhancements came along + got
even better within the past few years.
Someone who properly marked their ebooks THEN would automatically get those upgraded benefits NOW.
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Side Note: And, on a related note, Speech-to-Text got blown out of the water when a new open-source tool just got released 2 months ago:
It handles:
- interspersed languages
- Spanish word/sentence in the middle of English.
- strong accents
- strange terms/words
- low-quality audio
- A 1986 cassette-recorded lecture? No problem!
- [...]
It can even do:
- on-the-fly audio translation from X->Y language
- German audio -> English text
- Capitalization of terms
- Person speaks a book title or business name? Yep, it capitalizes it correctly.
I've been running it the past month, and it's
fantastic.
If you build it, the tools will come!
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
I've compared the same book (that has only <b> and <i>, no <em> or <strong> using TTS and human narrator. There is no issue with <b> and <i>. The books I've tried have the German, Irish and French parts marked.
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Look at JAWS + NVDA + blind-reader apps.
Watch the DAISY webinars. Heck, even within the past 2 months, they released many videos on the topic:
On some readers:
On production:
And they even had one focused on the European Accessibility Act (EAA)—a European Union law coming into effect in 2025—which is going to push Accessibility on many publishers:
And, on TTS specifically, we already had the discussion 1 year ago:
I described to you some of the latest TTS enhancements.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Accessibility is important. Like alt text for images that's a real description and not a caption. Anyone can do that in MS Word or LO Writer.
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And, what will happen when tools finally get added into Word/LO to do ACCESSIBLE THING X?
Will you continue to insist:
- "Nobody does it!"?
- "Do not use it!"?
- "It is hypothetical web browser stuff!"?
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Side Note: LibreOffice 7.5 (February 2023) is going to be adding lots of Accessibility checks:
Remember that thing where "nobody uses multi-language markup"? 7.5 will also be supporting many more languages:
(Some of this was introduced to support
ConLangs—artificially constructed languages—as well.)
InDesign and Word, every new version, is introducing more of this Accessibility adder/checker stuff too.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Turtle91
The point is, publishers should be following the standards for publishing, whether they are a big publisher or an indie author. "We've always done it that way" or "We're a big publisher so we don't care about xxxx" or "Typewriter's historically didn't have the ability to xxxxx" isn't really a valid reason to NOT follow the standard.
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Yep. Strive towards making the ebooks to the best of your ability.
Imagine Accessibility on a scale of 0 to 100.
You can easily get from 0->80+ just by using proper markup. (Headings, Tables, Images.)
From there, we can niggle about the details.
But to insist on using WORSE markup—when you clearly know better practices—is a huge mistake.
* * *
THE END.
Now... do we agree on that final period after the "END."? Or do we remove that superfluous punctuation in our ebooks?
That's the
real question graycn wants answered!