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Originally Posted by RWood
Should this be converted to ...
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This is the kind of decision an editor will face, and you probably will have to make up your own mind about it.
I think that your first duty (as an editor or publisher) is to your readers (well, OK, make it the second): any changes you make in the text should be based on that: does the text become more readable or more legible?
The next duty is towards the text: you don't rewrite it (much) just to get around some problem you have.
Gutenberg texts are tricky: the older texts have already passed through a similar kind of process, except that it was driven largely by other assumptions: one of those seems to have been that the original text isn't 'good' anyway, so mix and match between different editions if you like; foreign script and accents can be dropped or rendered in ASCII without further consideration, and there is no reason to pay any attention to any differences between plain text, italic text and small caps. (I admit I'm overstating the case. But I'm in a hurry.)
The text you mentioned may have been all upper case, or mixed upper and small caps, or even italics. All those would produce plain upper case text in a (older) Gutenberg text.
Personally, I would probably use italics, provided that I could be assured that the typeface actually used for final rendering produces an reasonably good text on screen. Otherwise I would choose plain text in the way you suggested yourself; text in all uppercase (even mixed upper and small caps) is difficult to read, and should be reserved for very short passages.
More modern Gutenberg texts (from the DP project) can be found in HTML format, which allows for italics. Sometimes it's better to start from those
to avoid the ALL-CAPS-RESTITUTION problem.