12-17-2022, 03:45 PM | #46 |
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I'll disagree. For example in Star Trek books, italic is used during a communication conversation. One side it italic and the other not. It's to differentiate who is speaking. And it's used for a Captain's log entry.
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12-17-2022, 10:43 PM | #47 | ||||||||
Wizard
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Thanks. I wasn't aware of that. - - - Side Note: Be careful using the HORIZONTAL BAR (U+2015) in ebooks, there are some issues. See the discussion back in: - - - Quote:
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:
And, there are also MANY other languages/cases where emphasis (and italics) are handled completely differently. Even see Braille: Quote:
Quote:
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. - - - 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:
It can even do:
I've been running it the past month, and it's fantastic. If you build it, the tools will come! - - - Quote:
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:
Will you continue to insist:
- - - 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. - - - Quote:
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! Last edited by Tex2002ans; 12-18-2022 at 12:13 AM. |
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12-18-2022, 03:16 AM | #48 | |
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– He said it was going to rain, didn't he? but the people who make the rules are probably not the same as those who make epubs … and no one in the real world would notice if you used emdash instead. Personally, I much prefer the simple quotation marks, since you can tell where the dialogue ends: "He said it was going to rain, didn't he?" Regards, Kim |
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12-18-2022, 03:37 AM | #49 | |
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AFAIK, the first style guide that recommended replacing to-day with today was H.W. Fowler's hugely popular book The King's English, which was first published in 1906.
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Last edited by Doitsu; 12-18-2022 at 04:42 AM. |
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12-18-2022, 04:46 AM | #50 |
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<em> & <strong> are mistakes because of the WC3 screwing up and saying <i> & <b> are no longer valid. If they keep <em> & <strong> in a back peddle screw-up, we would not have them. They were not created to be different to <i> & <b>. They were created to be <i> & <b>. It's just others trying to give <em> & <strong> a role they they don;t actually have and never will.
<em> & <strong> are nothing more then screwed-up versions of <i> & <b> with no difference at all. |
12-18-2022, 05:37 AM | #51 | |
the rook, bossing Never.
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So I'm agreeing with you. Last edited by Quoth; 12-18-2022 at 05:52 AM. |
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12-18-2022, 05:50 AM | #52 | |
the rook, bossing Never.
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The HTML specs wanted to abolish <i> and <b> and replace them with <em> and <strong>. Later they retconned and said it was semantics. Most publishers using <em> and <strong> are simply doing it instead of <i> and <b> and nothing to do with these alleged semantics. It's also irrelevant to TTS. It's more important to promote decent alt text for images. That's the single most important accessibility feature. Now it's totally true that languages other than western or even other than English do things differently. That's a completely different subject. But I know that many people swallowed the whole lie of <em> vs <i> and <strong> vs <b> as semantic choices years ago. It's not going to happen because it's an nearly impossible decision based on an artificial invention to paper over an earlier wrong decision by HTML/.W3C group (depreciating <i> and <b> entirely was simply arbitrary). After 14 years there is little evidence in the real world of such a semantic choice being made. It's a dead idea and doesn't help accessibility. |
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12-18-2022, 07:58 AM | #53 | ||||
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In Spanish, they're used as well. (I first learned about Quotation Dashes from my great friend, Jellby.)
For some more info, also check out the fantastic article: (The rest of the article is amazing—especially the Summary Table)—... the Quotation Dash section, not so much, but it's an okay stepping stone. Maybe other-lanugage Wikipedias would have a better article on the topic.) Quote:
Hopefully, in the future, font support in ebooks will get better. - - - Side Note: Speaking of weird Unicode characters... I recently learned I've been doing this wrong:
That little "apostrophe"-looking symbol? It's called an: which is a Hawaiian letter. In Unicode, it's actually a:
which IS NOT a LEFT/RIGHT SINGLE QUOTE, it's actually a flipped+reversed comma... (See Wikipedia page for example of it used in different languages.) For a little more info on how I stumbled upon this, see my post a few weeks ago. - - - Quote:
Like TO-day instead of to-DAY. You may be very interested in these 2 "Lexicon Valley" podcast episodes: Also, he covered it a little in: He describes the evolution of:
and how pronunciation changes over time. A "backshift" tends to occur. When words first come into being, the emphasis is usually on the SECOND part, but as it becomes more well-known, the emphasis shifts earlier. Some examples he described in the podcasts:
So, when they were new:
but as they became more well-known, the emphasis shifted earlier:
(Similar pattern happens with hyphens dropping out of words as they become more popular—e-mail -> email.) I'm suspecting to-morrow/to-day/to-night probably go way, way back to Middle English. Now, why those three didn't drop the hyphen until the 1900s->1940s? Unsure. Could've been Fowler that pushed it over the edge! - - - Side Note: While researching this, I just came across all these funky words from Middle English:
There were probably a ton of "to-" words, which all disappeared, even way before the 1800s. Those 3 (morning/day/night) are probably the few that survived into Modern English. - - - Quote:
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The previous threads/debates discussed all this, in extreme detail. Case after case has been brought up, explaining why emphasis and italics are different. Italics DOES NOT EXIST in many languages. Emphasis IS DONE COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY in many other languages. To continue insisting the opposite is just... I don't know what to say. Just reread the previous topics where Jellby, Turtle91, me, and others gave many details and explained, case-after-case, with example-after-example, of all sorts of reasoning why <em> + <i> are both used AND valid AND tools that make the distinction. * * * Anyway, I'm done going on about it. There's not much more to say since the last "emphasis debate". Nothing has really changed besides me learning more about Braille + tools blind readers actually use. (Which are linked above.) Last edited by Tex2002ans; 12-19-2022 at 05:39 AM. |
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12-18-2022, 08:49 AM | #54 | |
the rook, bossing Never.
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The progression of two words, hyphen and then compound words in English is documented well in The English Language (1985) Burchfield and other books.
Compound words are common in German and are old in Irish, but infrequently created in Irish compared to English. Several books I have give examples of English words that have a hyphen that are unlikely to lose it due to repeated identical vowels. It's a natural inevitable process in English. Quote:
I've never denied any of those points. Thus there is some validity for <strong> on some words rather than <b>. But it's bogus to claim the features of <em> and <strong> were added for accessibility (the history of the specs prove it) and in practice make no difference even if used properly (text read by humans proves it). If it's a real thing at all it's marginal and if it mattered the <strong> and <em> are overwhelmingly abused as simply an alternate to <i> and <b>. The scheme after 14 years hasn't worked and it doesn't matter. In English Emphasis and marking Emphatic dialogue may only matter in scripts for Plays, Radio Drama, TV & Movies that would have additional directions anyway. Neither fiction, journalism nor textbooks/reports are like Screenplays. A narration by a human of fiction isn't an Audio Drama either. We use accessibility features in LO Writer. But we only use features that make sense in the real world. Last edited by Quoth; 12-18-2022 at 08:59 AM. |
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12-18-2022, 10:32 AM | #55 |
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I'm not dealing with other languages. I'm just interested in English. So I only concern myself how it works in English.
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12-18-2022, 03:16 PM | #56 | |
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I'll let others do the non-English titles. Because I don't remember all that much of either my high-school French or Spanish at this late date. |
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12-18-2022, 03:28 PM | #57 | |
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Another children's title, but one absolutely riddled with two word combos that today would be compound words. It's positively annoying to read after a while. Black birds, camp fire, thunder storm, sage brush and the like. But a black bird is not necessarily the same thing as a blackbird! But y'all got a few years before I need to know whether to modernize or not! |
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12-18-2022, 03:30 PM | #58 | |
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However, if you want to modernize, give Shakespeare a go. |
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12-18-2022, 05:03 PM | #59 | |
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Rule 1: Consistent. Same global rules, except per speaker. A particular character might have a dialect. That should be internally consistent. Rule 2: The black bird. The Maltese Falcon comes to mind. Some separate words that exist as compound are not the same thing, so no "Replace All" click in editor. You know about that, but some are subtle. Like into is still sometimes in to and sometimes can be validly some times. Rule 3: if it's frequent old usage in the entire book leave it as it is, like Shakespeare or some other things it's what it is. Rule 4: If things like to-day are infrequent and it seems like poor proof reading you can silently "fix it", but maybe not if a pre-1914 print run. Rule 5: Even if things are left archaic, I think it's acceptable to do proofreading corrections that could have been done on the galleys and somehow didn't. But list them in notes at the end in case you're wrong! Rule 6: Minor Inconsistent punctuation and spelling, if you are really sure, can be silently fixed, but see 5. Rule 7: Don't Transatlantic edit. Establish if it's using British, US, Canadian, South African, Australian or NZ rules. Note that UK and Ireland today and in the past does use either double or single quotes for dialogue. Irish publishing more so, but for an aside the un-spaced pair of em dashes is largely USA and UK & Ireland uses (and always did) a pair of en dashes surrounded by spaces. For my own use I use double quotes for dialogue and the UK system of spaced en dashes for asides. But I'm in Ireland The USA tends to always use an Oxford comma in lists and UK & Ireland may 1) Not at all 2) puts it in only to reduce ambiguity 3) rarely always does it. It's mostly by publisher and era. like the single vs double quotes. Do it consistent with style of book. Oddly obsolete hyphens annoy me more than word pairs that are commonly compound, especially more modern books. Also things may have changed at different times in different regions. Last edited by Quoth; 12-18-2022 at 05:08 PM. |
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12-19-2022, 04:51 PM | #60 | |
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As an adult, I found it downright annoying, BUT: I read my father's books as a child and got thoroughly inundated with non-modern stuff, not to mention assorted stereotypes that absolutely would not fly today, and survived it all! I'll give Shakespeare a skip for modernizing, thanks. |
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