Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It's people like you who are the reason that I have to spend hundreds of hours proof-reading a book to put back all the formatting (italics, accented letters, etc) that you've removed from it  .
Seriously, things like italics are integral to a text, and losing them removes a great deal from a book. |
Hi Harry,
In my first paragraph, I said that I had just released my *first* book to the public. Prior to that, I have been assembling books for my personal use only, or adapting downloaded books to my personal taste. :P I *did* say that I am conservative with regards to formatting...
In any case, at the time, I strongly agreed with Project Gutenberg's original mandate to render everything in ASCII if possible, representing accented characters using regular punctuation (for example e' for acute accent, or c, for c-cedille in French) and so on because in those days the word processor wars were still on-going. I have seen too many data formats disappear and become difficult to read.
Also, non-ASCII characters were difficult to represent for most people because Unicode fonts were not widely available (and still not that many are today) and language encoding was still a rather esoteric subject.
Now that HTML is a wide spread markup format, and Unicode is an established standard in wide use, I find it safer to trust my data to them.
I always kind of liked ASCII style /italics/, _underlining_ and *bold* too ^_^