Best way to do italic and bold

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Or people who use the word "literally" when they actually mean "figuratively", as in "I literally died of fright!" .

The "literally"/"figuratively" pair is also the one to show common misuses in the xkcd comics.

I think every language has this sets of "make my ears bleed"
Some appearing in multiple languages, some being unique to a language.

In German there is the (vulgar) habit of applying a superlative suffix to
"only/sole": einzig -> einzigst
Gives you the following: "She was the onliest of us, the bouncer let into the club." Painful enough to read?

In English I don't get how people can hear/read quotative like and keep a straight face at some of it.

[bookman156]

Originally Posted by fbrzvnrnd

Mine was a hyperbole . But I noticed that perfection is detrimental to the changes, and especially in this era of transition from one media to another, the error is actually "a way to find other ways" to make digital narrative or information. I think we will make a lot of mistakes for a long time, partly because the tools we work with are not suitable to really make digital publishing.

Digital publishing in the future is bound to be some kind of virtual reality experience.

But for now the advantages/disadvantages of digital publishing, depending on your point of view, is that ebooks are easy to pirate and the quantity of self-published mediocre books has increased exponentially (print publishing is also 90% mediocrity, but at least there the bar is a little bit higher to actually bothering to publish something, thus cutting down on it a little). Oh, okay, it's useful to be able to carry a 1000 books on a trek for the weight of one and to search in the text. Apart from that, I still prefer print books. I must be a dinosaur.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by bookman156

Digital publishing in the future is bound to be some kind of virtual reality experience.

But for now the advantages/disadvantages of digital publishing, depending on your point of view, is that ebooks are easy to pirate and the quantity of self-published mediocre books has increased exponentially (print publishing is also 90% mediocrity, but at least there the bar is a little bit higher to actually bothering to publish something, thus cutting down on it a little). Oh, okay, it's useful to be able to carry a 1000 books on a trek for the weight of one and to search in the text. Apart from that, I still prefer print books. I must be a dinosaur.

Another phenomenon is the publishing in eBook form many books that are out of print and hard to find. Some are excellent and there is a proliferation of out of copyright books from times gone by giving us a fresh perspective on recent history. What I see is a bunch of books to read that would otherwise be unavailable. I prefer a eBook much more than nothing. I must be a dinosaur of a different sort.

Dale

[bookman156]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Another phenomenon is the publishing in eBook form many books that are out of print and hard to find. Some are excellent and there is a proliferation of out of copyright books from times gone by giving us a fresh perspective on recent history. What I see is a bunch of books to read that would otherwise be unavailable. I prefer a eBook much more than nothing. I must be a dinosaur of a different sort.

Dale

Yes, this is a good point. I still remember what research was like in the years before the internet. Traipsing to the British Library to read on microfilm what can now be hosted on the web in PDF. I'm not sure it has improved the quality of research though. When you had to blow dust off books and wear out shoe leather you appreciated what you found a lot more than perhaps people do when it is a few seconds away from a search engine. The number of ebooks I have that I simply haven't read yet far exceeds the number of print books. I fear some people may no longer be reading books, but rather just searching them and data-mining them. This adds a different perspective on knowledge. Still, I agree with you, being able to get hold of books that in the past would have been difficult to obtain has to be a good thing.

[fbrzvnrnd]

Originally Posted by bookman156

bothering to publish something, thus cutting down on it a little). Oh, okay, it's useful to be able to carry a 1000 books on a trek for the weight of one and to search in the text. Apart from that, I still prefer print books. I must be a dinosaur.

I think there are more changes. Digital lets you continue the publication of things that, on paper , would not be sustainable. Magazine for example, or poetry. It enables the maintenance of a catalog titles for times that on paper would be impossibile. It allows you to create texts in which a whole range of expressive tools (like footnotes, pictures, graphs, datas) become something radically different. Of course I'm thinking about texts born designed for digital. And yes, microdata, indexing, markup, code are the next way to handle information. Because, remember, the book is not *the* informations, it is only a way to handle them. Not the only one.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by fbrzvnrnd

I think there are more changes. Digital lets you continue the publication of things that, on paper , would not be sustainable.

It also allows the republication of material that has entered the public domain where this would not be economically feasible for traditional publishing. I'm studying part-time for a degree in Egyptology, and much of the seminal work on the subject was published in the 19th century, and is now freely available as page-scanned PDFs at sites like "archive.org". Previously such material would only have been available to specialist researchers at a few university or museum libraries. Digital publishing, and the scanning of public domain works by companies like Google has made a treasure-trove of material available to anyone who wants it.

[Notjohn]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

In German there is the (vulgar) habit of applying a superlative suffix to
"only/sole": einzig -> einzigst
.

It's the same in English! We have things that are unique (one of a kind), but alas we also have things that are "more unique" or even "most unique."

[Freeshadow]

How do you perceive quotative like?
Always when I read or hear "$_foo was like $_bar" instead of "$_foo said $_bar"; before my inner eye unfolds the image of $_foo miming $_bar. Can't help it.
More often than not it's hard to not laugh then.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by fbrzvnrnd

What I'm doing is create real ebooks.

As opposed to fake eBooks.

[fbrzvnrnd]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

As opposed to fake eBooks.

Digital books opposed to digitized books.
Or, better, digital contents opposed to digitized papers.

[fbrzvnrnd]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It also allows the republication of material that has entered the public domain where this would not be economically feasible for traditional publishing. I'm studying part-time for a degree in Egyptology, and much of the seminal work on the subject was published in the 19th century, and is now freely available as page-scanned PDFs at sites like "archive.org". Previously such material would only have been available to specialist researchers at a few university or museum libraries. Digital publishing, and the scanning of public domain works by companies like Google has made a treasure-trove of material available to anyone who wants it.

Also. And I can add: the aggregation of free and non-free material scattered in times and places (as internet) in a homogeneous ambient of reading. Noise free.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by fbrzvnrnd

Again: why the author is using a italic? "It is a dream sequence". Is there a "dream tag"? Not in XHTML. Maybe in TEI, I don't know (for example, in TEI we have tag for ironic sentences). XHTML give us poor poor semantics.

The reason for the italics is to show that it's different. It's a dream sequence. It's not what happening when awake.

Star Trek eBooks use italics for one side of a conversation. So if the scene is on a planet where the person is talking to someone on the ship, the ship's side of the conversation will be italics so you know who is saying what.

It's very easy to understand all of this.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by bookman156

I also don't see what the point of providing a dream class div is when <em> is perfectly fine. Although editorially mere italic or emphasised voice may not be enough to distinguish a dream sequence from a non-dream sequence and some discussion between the author and editor would doubtless ensue over that point.

I don't see the point of <em> when <i> will do. <em> adds two extra characters where <i> does not.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by bookman156

Life is a dream. We don't italicise that. Perhaps we haven't realised...

Sometimes people dream in B&W. Same as reading in italics.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Everything you've mentioned with the exception of last/past is something I'd personally expect any literate person to be familiar with, but perhaps my expectations are too high. I sometimes think I'm the last person left on Earth who still cares about the difference between "who" and "whom" .

Don't forget the old can/may argument.