Quote:
Originally Posted by GlenBarrington
I think I can understand why someone really into Dickens would want to replicate the formatting of a paperbook as much as possible.
|
No, it's not about
replicating the formatting of a paper book, just correcting errors, adding back all the missing formatting - italics, accented letters, proper formatting of letters, songs and poetry - that kind of thing.
Most of the free versions of the classics are based on PG originals, and unfortunately it's often the very greatest classics that are in the worst shape, because they were typed in by hand, with all the resulting errors that produced. Eg, when I was proofing my version of "The Old Curiosity Shop" I found two cases where the PG edition was missing what was obviously a complete double page of the original book - the person who typed it in had obviously turned over two pages by mistake, and hadn't noticed. In addition to that there were several missing paragraphs, and a large number of missing sentences. Those are the kind of errors that you can
only find by proofing against a printed (or scanned) original.
That's in addition to the more mundane task of restoring italics, accented letters, and so on.