Editing questions

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

When the book has bars or something to break up, do you use characters to try and mimic what they did (such as doing a line of asterisks), or use a horizon line (<hr>)?

If all such breaks are marked in the same way, use whatever you like best. I tend to use just a blank space, Project Gutenberg uses a row of five asterisks separated by seven spaces, a short <hr> or some dingbat character would also be OK. I usually don't try to reproduce the exact format, but create a new "edition" with my own taste.

Also, do you change grammar and punctuation for modern standards, such as making to-morrow into tomorrow.

In Spanish books I often modernize and correct the spelling and punctuation (mostly the accents and placement of dashes and spaces), because the original is sometimes inconsistent and looks "wrong" today. In English I try to keep the spelling as printed (because I think it does not look so "wrong", and because English is not my mother tongue). In PG they maintain the printed spelling. Whatever you do, be consistent (and specify it in a "publisher's note" or similar).

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

What I found to be most strange was the use of quotation marks. For example, this was how the original had a letter quoted:
. . .

It is common in American English for a continuous quote, like you displayed here to only have opening quote marks until the very end of the quoted material when a closing quote mark is used. What you displayed is correct usage.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Change the punctuation, by all means. That is something that's routinely changed by the publisher anyway. But leave the grammar alone - choice of grammar is down to the author, and if you mess with that you no longer have what the author wrote.

Publishers also routinely fix grammar issues. The problem with the discussion here is that while we all are probably on the same page as to what is meant by punctuation, it isn't clear to me (at least) what is meant by grammar. For example, is changing to-morrow to tomorrow a grammar issue or a spelling issue (they are not always the same thing)? Are we talking usage, sentence structure, split infinitives, sentence-ending prepositions, something else?

Without carefully defining what is meant by grammar, the advice to modernize grammar or to retain the original is somewhat meaningless.

[AJ Starr]

For the breaks in the text, if you have more than, say, 3 asterisks and/or whatever you use, and the person reading the book likes to have the text enlarged, then the asterisks flow to the next line.

Personally, all the books I convert to ebooks, I make 1 (one) centered asterisk for the break.

I also do not separate the chapters with a page break. Just 2 blank lines above the "Chapter" line and one blank line before the text starts.

I originally did a page break for the chapters but found I was getting one or two lines on the last page and then had to turn the page again.

Just my preference.

As far as hyphens showing up in the middle of words, I always assume that was the pbooks' end-of-line that was converted, and I would take all hyphens out of whole words, making sure I left them in hyphenated words.

AJ

[Hellmark]

That is one thing I do prefer, having the chapter breaks. That part is more book like, since I routinely run into parts where only a few lines will be on a page. Plus just find it odd that two chapters are being shown at the same time otherwise (just like I hate how in ADE based readers, it will show like "pages 151-152 of 308"). A little division helps keeps things straight in my head.