Quote:
Originally Posted by Rand Brittain
The talk about censorship and politically-correct language is interesting and all, but I was really asking about punctuation and formatting, which is a much more specific question that (thankfully) doesn't touch on racial or gender issues.
|
You're quite right, Rand. Hopefully there are a few posts in this tread that address your query more directly. At the beginning, I and others suggested that it was a very slippery slope; that you should proceed carefully.
I think the somewhat off-topic posts after that illustrate that slip-slope principle perfectly.
So...
Be careful.
Be thoughtful.
Be consistent.
and
Resist most temptations.
Oh, and add transcriber notes [at the beginning!], even if they are somewhat general.
Here, I picked one at random from a PG publication. I personally prefer to leave hyphenation as it originally appears, but some decisions regarding hyphens are unavoidable.
Does your work have footnotes? Tricky, huh? Leaving them end-of-page is really not an option. Do you move them in-line? End of paragraph? End of chapter? End of work? Your decision.
Does your work have tables? If you think it is tough for you, imagine how the original typesetter felt! Do you replicate them perfectly? Do you adjust columns for the format? Do you remove [now] unnecessary headers? You usually
can not replicate them perfectly, so how do you best convey the original intent? Your decision.
What about those drop-cases at the beginning of each chapter? How ornate do they have to be before you decide to include them? That's a lot of work, but damn! they look pretty.
Do you preserve--in code or otherwise--the page numbers on which the original text appeared?
What about italics, bold and smallcaps? Does the period or comma go in the tags or outside the tags? Doesn't matter, you say!? I can point you to a 100,000 post thread on DP about that very topic. That is really heady stuff.
Decisions, decisions, decisions. That's why they pay you the big bucks.