The end of "THE END"?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

It's regarded as poor writing style to use italics in dialogue or bold in the body at all in fiction.

I'll disagree. For example in Star Trek books, italic is used during a communication conversation. One side it italic and the other not. It's to differentiate who is speaking. And it's used for a Captain's log entry.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by elibrarian

This is to some extent language specific. IIRC j.p.s. is norwegian, and I would suspect they have the same "peculiarities" as we do in danish:

– Only one type of dash (you can use en- or em- as you please, as long as you use the same type consistently), [...] (The emdash-like character sometimes used to signify dialog is a "horizontal bar", unicode ― – if correctly coded).

So, Danish also uses a quotation dash?

Thanks. I wasn't aware of that.

- - -

Side Note: Be careful using the HORIZONTAL BAR (U+2015) in ebooks, there are some issues.

See the discussion back in:

• 2019: "No break space and alignment"

- - -

Originally Posted by GrannyGrump

I know precisely what you mean. I don't use their (maddening) markup code, but I do like the idea of killing italics on currently common words (alibi, role, cafe, etc); killing hyphens on words we don't hyphenate any more (apologies to purists, but to-day with a hyphen is just irritating to me), and a bunch of other simplifications they use.

How dare you!

What if you resumed writing that on your résumé to-day? Who would hire you after they learn the rôle you played in devolving society by removing essential hyphens and italics?

Will you coöperate with the language-/book-police when they come to arrest you?

You know who I won't be reëlecting to lead the Ebook-Editing Club to-morrow? GrannyGrump! When do I want her gone? To-day!

Originally Posted by Quoth

My aim was to show that most of the argumentative post on this subject in the last few years misses the point with the focus on a mostly hypothetical concept TTS & Accessibility and standards invented by people focused on building web browsers.

The advantages/use-cases are not hypothetical. They are real AND being used in the current day.

And, there are also MANY other languages/cases where emphasis (and italics) are handled completely differently.

Even see Braille:

• Wikipedia.org: "English Braille" > Formatting Marks

Formatting marks

Braille has several formatting marks, sometimes called "composition signs", "register marks", or "indicators", which have no one-to-one correspondence with printed English. These are the number sign ⟨⠼⟩, the letter sign ⟨⠰⟩, the capital sign ⟨⠠⟩, the italic sign (or more accurately the emphasis sign) ⟨⠨⟩, and the termination sign ⟨⠠⠄⟩ (written cap–apostrophe). These immediately precede the sequence (word or number) they modify, without an intervening space.

[...]

The emphasis (italic) sign marks emphatic formatting, equivalent to printed italic, bold, underlined, and small-capital text.[29] A single italic sign emphasizes the entire word (or number). For two or three emphasized words, each takes a separate marker. For longer texts, a doubled marker is placed before the first word, and the end of the emphasis is indicated by marking the final emphasized word with a single italic sign.

When the capitalization or emphasis does not span the entire word, the beginning and end is marked with a hyphen.

And, on emphasis in other languages, see my post from 2021:

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Auto-Translation

Many languages don't have such a thing as "italics"... and they represent emphasis differently.

For example, emphasis in:

• Arabic
  
  • extra lines above/below, different fonts, or extra stretched-out lettering.
• Hebrew
  
  • bolder, underline, or larger gaps between letters (letter-spacing).
• Chinese/Japanese/Korean
  
  • extra dots/symbols around characters.

Imagine you were a Japanese reader, and after an English->Japanese translate, every single word in your book titles had extra emphasis dots placed on it. That's not correct.

- - -

Side Note: For extra info on emphasis in other languages, I just ran across this great talk:

• TYPO Labs 2017: "Liron Lavi Turkenich | Go bolder, just slant it—secondary styles in Hebrew"

She mostly shows examples of Hebrew, but she also quickly skims over Cyrillic (Russian) + Hangul (Korean).

Side Note #2: Remember:

European-based languages tend to have an italics font + emphasis as italics... but the rest of the world doesn't.

And it's only by a quirk of history that both italics/emphasis look the same (in English).

Not all languages are like that!

I strongly recommend reading up on Internationalization.

BILLIONS of people have joined the internet + read/write/speak non-Latin languages + use computers in alternate ways, which is why Accessibility+proper markup has gotten even more important than ever before.

Look at all the tools I mentioned with HTML lang alone:

• 2022: "<i>, <em> or <span> for italics ?" (Post #237)

Many of those enhancements came along + got even better within the past few years.

Someone who properly marked their ebooks THEN would automatically get those upgraded benefits NOW.

- - -

Side Note: And, on a related note, Speech-to-Text got blown out of the water when a new open-source tool just got released 2 months ago:

• Whisper (Github)

It handles:

• interspersed languages
  
  • Spanish word/sentence in the middle of English.
• strong accents
• strange terms/words
• low-quality audio
  
  • A 1986 cassette-recorded lecture? No problem!
• [...]

It can even do:

• on-the-fly audio translation from X->Y language
  
  • German audio -> English text
    
• Capitalization of terms
  
  • Person speaks a book title or business name? Yep, it capitalizes it correctly.
    

I've been running it the past month, and it's fantastic.

If you build it, the tools will come!

- - -

Originally Posted by Quoth

I've compared the same book (that has only <b> and <i>, no <em> or <strong> using TTS and human narrator. There is no issue with <b> and <i>. The books I've tried have the German, Irish and French parts marked.

Look at JAWS + NVDA + blind-reader apps.

Watch the DAISY webinars. Heck, even within the past 2 months, they released many videos on the topic:

On some readers:

• DAISY Consoritum: "Accessible Reading Systems"
• (Look through the channel's backlog for more.)

On production:

• "Lessons Learned in the Journey to Accessible Publishing"
• "Accessible Publishing Fundamentals Webinar"
• "Creating and Editing Accessible EPUB"
• "Accessible Publishing Support"

And they even had one focused on the European Accessibility Act (EAA)—a European Union law coming into effect in 2025—which is going to push Accessibility on many publishers:

• "European Accessibility Act - Update"

And, on TTS specifically, we already had the discussion 1 year ago:

• 2021: "Telling a text-to-speech reader how to pronounce things?"

I described to you some of the latest TTS enhancements.

Originally Posted by Quoth

Accessibility is important. Like alt text for images that's a real description and not a caption. Anyone can do that in MS Word or LO Writer.

And, what will happen when tools finally get added into Word/LO to do ACCESSIBLE THING X?

Will you continue to insist:

• "Nobody does it!"?
• "Do not use it!"?
• "It is hypothetical web browser stuff!"?

- - -

Side Note: LibreOffice 7.5 (February 2023) is going to be adding lots of Accessibility checks:

• LibreOffice 7.5 Release Notes > Accessibility

Remember that thing where "nobody uses multi-language markup"? 7.5 will also be supporting many more languages:

• 7.5 Release Notes > Localization

(Some of this was introduced to support ConLangs—artificially constructed languages—as well.)

InDesign and Word, every new version, is introducing more of this Accessibility adder/checker stuff too.

- - -

Originally Posted by Turtle91

The point is, publishers should be following the standards for publishing, whether they are a big publisher or an indie author. "We've always done it that way" or "We're a big publisher so we don't care about xxxx" or "Typewriter's historically didn't have the ability to xxxxx" isn't really a valid reason to NOT follow the standard.

Yep. Strive towards making the ebooks to the best of your ability.

Imagine Accessibility on a scale of 0 to 100.

You can easily get from 0->80+ just by using proper markup. (Headings, Tables, Images.)

From there, we can niggle about the details.

But to insist on using WORSE markup—when you clearly know better practices—is a huge mistake.

* * *

THE END.

Now... do we agree on that final period after the "END."? Or do we remove that superfluous punctuation in our ebooks?

That's the real question graycn wants answered!

[elibrarian]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

So, Danish also uses a quotation dash?

Thanks. I wasn't aware of that.

- - -

Side Note: Be careful using the HORIZONTAL BAR (U+2015) in ebooks, there are some issues.

We do, like:

– He said it was going to rain, didn't he?

but the people who make the rules are probably not the same as those who make epubs … and no one in the real world would notice if you used emdash instead.

Personally, I much prefer the simple quotation marks, since you can tell where the dialogue ends:

"He said it was going to rain, didn't he?"

Regards,

Kim

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by GrannyGrump

[...] but to-day with a hyphen is just irritating to me)

AFAIK, the first style guide that recommended replacing to-day with today was H.W. Fowler's hugely popular book The King's English, which was first published in 1906.

Originally Posted by Fowler

There comes a time when compound words that have long had a hyphen should drop it; this is when they have become quite familiar. It seems absurd to keep any longer the division in to-day and to-morrow; there are no words in the language that are more definitely single and not double words; so much so that the ordinary man can give no explanation of the to.

I.e., even purists can't complain if you replace to-day with today in books published after 1906.

[JSWolf]

<em> & <strong> are mistakes because of the WC3 screwing up and saying <i> & <b> are no longer valid. If they keep <em> & <strong> in a back peddle screw-up, we would not have them. They were not created to be different to <i> & <b>. They were created to be <i> & <b>. It's just others trying to give <em> & <strong> a role they they don;t actually have and never will.

<em> & <strong> are nothing more then screwed-up versions of <i> & <b> with no difference at all.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'll disagree. For example in Star Trek books, italic is used during a communication conversation. One side it italic and the other not. It's to differentiate who is speaking. And it's used for a Captain's log entry.

Those are different, not a single italic word in a paragraph. The remote side of a conversation would be entire paragraphs. The log being in italics is entire paragraphs, like letter or quotation. Both of those wouldn't contravene any style guide.

So I'm agreeing with you.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

And, what will happen when tools finally get added into Word/LO to do ACCESSIBLE THING X?

Will you continue to insist:

• "Nobody does it!"?
• "Do not use it!"?
• "It is hypothetical web browser stuff!"?

I'll use real accessibility features.

The HTML specs wanted to abolish <i> and <b> and replace them with <em> and <strong>. Later they retconned and said it was semantics.
Most publishers using <em> and <strong> are simply doing it instead of <i> and <b> and nothing to do with these alleged semantics. It's also irrelevant to TTS. It's more important to promote decent alt text for images. That's the single most important accessibility feature.

Now it's totally true that languages other than western or even other than English do things differently. That's a completely different subject.

But I know that many people swallowed the whole lie of <em> vs <i> and <strong> vs <b> as semantic choices years ago.
It's not going to happen because it's an nearly impossible decision based on an artificial invention to paper over an earlier wrong decision by HTML/.W3C group (depreciating <i> and <b> entirely was simply arbitrary).

After 14 years there is little evidence in the real world of such a semantic choice being made. It's a dead idea and doesn't help accessibility.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by elibrarian

We do, like:

– He said it was going to rain, didn't he?

In Spanish, they're used as well. (I first learned about Quotation Dashes from my great friend, Jellby.)

For some more info, also check out the fantastic article:

• Wikipedia.org: "Quotation Mark" > Quotation Dash

(The rest of the article is amazing—especially the Summary Table)—... the Quotation Dash section, not so much, but it's an okay stepping stone. Maybe other-lanugage Wikipedias would have a better article on the topic.)

Originally Posted by elibrarian

but the people who make the rules are probably not the same as those who make epubs … and no one in the real world would notice if you used emdash instead.

Yes, the EM DASH is what I recommended in that thread once I tested the HORIZONTAL BAR. (Yes, it's the correct Unicode character for a "Quotation Dash", and should be used where possible...)

Hopefully, in the future, font support in ebooks will get better.

- - -

Side Note: Speaking of weird Unicode characters... I recently learned I've been doing this wrong:

• ✗ Hawai’i
• ✓ Hawaiʻi

That little "apostrophe"-looking symbol? It's called an:

• ʻokina

which is a Hawaiian letter.

In Unicode, it's actually a:

• ʻ = U+02BB = MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA

which IS NOT a LEFT/RIGHT SINGLE QUOTE, it's actually a flipped+reversed comma... (See Wikipedia page for example of it used in different languages.)

For a little more info on how I stumbled upon this, see my post a few weeks ago.

- - -

Originally Posted by Doitsu

AFAIK, the first style guide that recommended replacing to-day with today was H.W. Fowler's hugely popular book The King's English, [...]

[...]

I.e., even purists can't complain if you replace to-day with today in books published after 1906.

I'm suspecting it's because of different pronunciation back then.

Like TO-day instead of to-DAY.

You may be very interested in these 2 "Lexicon Valley" podcast episodes:

• Lexicon Valley: "Word Sex: How words hook up and make new ones."

Also, he covered it a little in:

• "Defund Karen"

He describes the evolution of:

• new/two words
  
  • (compound words)
• -> hyphenated
• -> no hyphen

and how pronunciation changes over time.

A "backshift" tends to occur. When words first come into being, the emphasis is usually on the SECOND part, but as it becomes more well-known, the emphasis shifts earlier.

Some examples he described in the podcasts:

• deejay
• Batman
• suspect
• supermarket
• blackboard
• hot dog

So, when they were new:

• dee-JAY
• bat-MAN
• suh-SPECT
• super-MARKET
• black-BOARD
• hot DOG

but as they became more well-known, the emphasis shifted earlier:

• DEE-jay
• BAT-man
• SUH-spect
• SUPER-market
• BLACK-board
• HOT dog

(Similar pattern happens with hyphens dropping out of words as they become more popular—e-mail -> email.)

I'm suspecting to-morrow/to-day/to-night probably go way, way back to Middle English.

Now, why those three didn't drop the hyphen until the 1900s->1940s? Unsure. Could've been Fowler that pushed it over the edge!

- - -

Side Note: While researching this, I just came across all these funky words from Middle English:

• to-beat
• to-bread
• to-break
• to-brest
• to-burst
• to-draw
• to-drive
• to-fore
• to-forehand
• to-foren
• to-frush
• to-grind
• to-heap
• to-hew
• to-morn
• to-name

There were probably a ton of "to-" words, which all disappeared, even way before the 1800s.

Those 3 (morning/day/night) are probably the few that survived into Modern English.

- - -

Originally Posted by JSWolf

<em> & <strong> are nothing more then screwed-up versions of <i> & <b> with no difference at all.

Enough of this tomfoolery. You're embarrassing yourself now.

Originally Posted by Quoth

After 14 years there is little evidence in the real world of such a semantic choice being made. It's a dead idea and doesn't help accessibility.

Same with this.

The previous threads/debates discussed all this, in extreme detail.

Case after case has been brought up, explaining why emphasis and italics are different.

Italics DOES NOT EXIST in many languages.

Emphasis IS DONE COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY in many other languages.

To continue insisting the opposite is just... I don't know what to say.

Just reread the previous topics where Jellby, Turtle91, me, and others gave many details and explained, case-after-case, with example-after-example, of all sorts of reasoning why <em> + <i> are both used AND valid AND tools that make the distinction.

* * *

Anyway, I'm done going on about it. There's not much more to say since the last "emphasis debate".

Nothing has really changed besides me learning more about Braille + tools blind readers actually use. (Which are linked above.)

[Quoth]

The progression of two words, hyphen and then compound words in English is documented well in The English Language (1985) Burchfield and other books.
Compound words are common in German and are old in Irish, but infrequently created in Irish compared to English.

Several books I have give examples of English words that have a hyphen that are unlikely to lose it due to repeated identical vowels.

It's a natural inevitable process in English.

Case after case has been brought up, explaining why emphasis and italics are different.

Italics DOES NOT EXIST in many languages.

Emphasis IS DONE COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY in many other languages

All true and in English Emphasis more often done using bold, not italics.
I've never denied any of those points. Thus there is some validity for <strong> on some words rather than <b>.
But it's bogus to claim the features of <em> and <strong> were added for accessibility (the history of the specs prove it) and in practice make no difference even if used properly (text read by humans proves it). If it's a real thing at all it's marginal and if it mattered the <strong> and <em> are overwhelmingly abused as simply an alternate to <i> and <b>. The scheme after 14 years hasn't worked and it doesn't matter.

In English Emphasis and marking Emphatic dialogue may only matter in scripts for Plays, Radio Drama, TV & Movies that would have additional directions anyway. Neither fiction, journalism nor textbooks/reports are like Screenplays. A narration by a human of fiction isn't an Audio Drama either.

We use accessibility features in LO Writer. But we only use features that make sense in the real world.

[JSWolf]

I'm not dealing with other languages. I'm just interested in English. So I only concern myself how it works in English.

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'm not dealing with other languages. I'm just interested in English. So I only concern myself how it works in English.

Same here, thank goodness! And my books are appropriately marked as English language, so that should handle English punctuation norms.

I'll let others do the non-English titles. Because I don't remember all that much of either my high-school French or Spanish at this late date.

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by Quoth

The progression of two words, hyphen and then compound words in English is documented well in The English Language (1985) Burchfield and other books.

And that's possibly an upcoming question, LOL! I do have a title that is NOT YET eligible for MobileRead, but the author died in 1955, so if I stay this side of the dirt, as Hitch says, maybe.

Another children's title, but one absolutely riddled with two word combos that today would be compound words. It's positively annoying to read after a while.

Black birds, camp fire, thunder storm, sage brush and the like. But a black bird is not necessarily the same thing as a blackbird! But y'all got a few years before I need to know whether to modernize or not!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by graycyn

And that's possibly an upcoming question, LOL! I do have a title that is NOT YET eligible for MobileRead, but the author died in 1955, so if I stay this side of the dirt, as Hitch says, maybe.

Another children's title, but one absolutely riddled with two word combos that today would be compound words. It's positively annoying to read after a while.

Black birds, camp fire, thunder storm, sage brush and the like. But a black bird is not necessarily the same thing as a blackbird! But y'all got a few years before I need to know whether to modernize or not!

I'm OK leaving it as it originally was.

However, if you want to modernize, give Shakespeare a go.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by graycyn

And that's possibly an upcoming question, LOL! I do have a title that is NOT YET eligible for MobileRead, but the author died in 1955, so if I stay this side of the dirt, as Hitch says, maybe.

Another children's title, but one absolutely riddled with two word combos that today would be compound words. It's positively annoying to read after a while.

Black birds, camp fire, thunder storm, sage brush and the like. But a black bird is not necessarily the same thing as a blackbird! But y'all got a few years before I need to know whether to modernize or not!

Depends on how consistent how frequent and when it was. However generally I'd leave it original.

Rule 1: Consistent. Same global rules, except per speaker. A particular character might have a dialect. That should be internally consistent.

Rule 2: The black bird. The Maltese Falcon comes to mind. Some separate words that exist as compound are not the same thing, so no "Replace All" click in editor. You know about that, but some are subtle. Like into is still sometimes in to and sometimes can be validly some times.

Rule 3: if it's frequent old usage in the entire book leave it as it is, like Shakespeare or some other things it's what it is.

Rule 4: If things like to-day are infrequent and it seems like poor proof reading you can silently "fix it", but maybe not if a pre-1914 print run.

Rule 5: Even if things are left archaic, I think it's acceptable to do proofreading corrections that could have been done on the galleys and somehow didn't. But list them in notes at the end in case you're wrong!

Rule 6: Minor Inconsistent punctuation and spelling, if you are really sure, can be silently fixed, but see 5.

Rule 7: Don't Transatlantic edit. Establish if it's using British, US, Canadian, South African, Australian or NZ rules. Note that UK and Ireland today and in the past does use either double or single quotes for dialogue. Irish publishing more so, but for an aside the un-spaced pair of em dashes is largely USA and UK & Ireland uses (and always did) a pair of en dashes surrounded by spaces.

For my own use I use double quotes for dialogue and the UK system of spaced en dashes for asides. But I'm in Ireland

The USA tends to always use an Oxford comma in lists and UK & Ireland may
1) Not at all
2) puts it in only to reduce ambiguity
3) rarely always does it.
It's mostly by publisher and era. like the single vs double quotes. Do it consistent with style of book.

Oddly obsolete hyphens annoy me more than word pairs that are commonly compound, especially more modern books.
Also things may have changed at different times in different regions.

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'm OK leaving it as it originally was.

However, if you want to modernize, give Shakespeare a go.

I'm OK with leaving it original as well, however it could annoy a child brought up with more modern usage. Then again, a child who likes to read probably won't care one way or another. Parents downloading the book may even prefer their child get exposed to older styles of writing!

As an adult, I found it downright annoying, BUT:

I read my father's books as a child and got thoroughly inundated with non-modern stuff, not to mention assorted stereotypes that absolutely would not fly today, and survived it all!

I'll give Shakespeare a skip for modernizing, thanks.