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Book formatting adventures
Jul. 24th, 2021 06:11 pmI'm working on turning Imre: A Memorandum into an ebook. Unlike my previous two ebooks, Imre was not published in the typical way (because of the subject matter, it couldn't have been); it was privately printed at an English press in Naples. This unusual history seems to have led to a bit of irregularity in the formatting, which I'm having an interesting time dealing with.
To begin with, there are a lot of the typical sorts of straightforward printing errors, which I generally correct as I go, although the actual missing words can be slightly tricky to figure out. More entertaining is the dialogue formatting: some of the dialogue is "like this" and some is «like this», sometimes switching back and forth within a scene. I think this comes from the Italian printing, because «angled quotes» are standard in Italian (Hungarian does dialogue „like this“—which format has, oddly, turned up in the book as well, but only once). Ellipses are another one—they contain anything from two to eight dots, apparently at random, and the spacing is very irregular. The book is in long sections rather than chapters, and these are broken up occasionally by blank lines between the paragraphs—but there also seem to be some random extra blank lines which, as far as I can tell, aren't intended to mark breaks, and it's a bit of headache trying to decide which ones are deliberate and which ones to remove.
I have to decide how to represent this in the ebook, which is an interesting question. Project Gutenberg's guidelines allow for some freedom with this sort of thing, and copying the original exactly usually seems to be allowed even if the original is non-standard. I quite like getting to see these idiosyncrasies, as part of the history of the original book as a physical object and process of publication, and I'm inclined to try to preserve some of the weirdness rather than standardising everything—but I think the switching quote styles may be a bit too confusing.
The actual quality of the printing is also not the best (though that may be partly the scans). Words are occasionally obscured, and it's very difficult to tell the difference between different accents on letters—which appear fairly often in Hungarian, German, a bit of French, etc. words, which I keep having to look up to make sure I'm getting them right. Happily—as I have learnt from trying to figure this out—Hungarian at least only uses acute accents, not grave or circumflex, so I know that fake-Budapest is correctly Szent-Istvánhely.
Anyway, in the midst of all this I'm very much enjoying the book itself. I think paying so much attention to the text is getting me to appreciate it more—the emotions in the first part are so quietly lovely, and I absolutely love how it sounds so exactly like how merely subtexual/slashy books from the same period often sound, using such similar phrases and details... but this time it stops being subtextual.
( A couple of favourite quotes, idiosyncratic formatting included )
To begin with, there are a lot of the typical sorts of straightforward printing errors, which I generally correct as I go, although the actual missing words can be slightly tricky to figure out. More entertaining is the dialogue formatting: some of the dialogue is "like this" and some is «like this», sometimes switching back and forth within a scene. I think this comes from the Italian printing, because «angled quotes» are standard in Italian (Hungarian does dialogue „like this“—which format has, oddly, turned up in the book as well, but only once). Ellipses are another one—they contain anything from two to eight dots, apparently at random, and the spacing is very irregular. The book is in long sections rather than chapters, and these are broken up occasionally by blank lines between the paragraphs—but there also seem to be some random extra blank lines which, as far as I can tell, aren't intended to mark breaks, and it's a bit of headache trying to decide which ones are deliberate and which ones to remove.
I have to decide how to represent this in the ebook, which is an interesting question. Project Gutenberg's guidelines allow for some freedom with this sort of thing, and copying the original exactly usually seems to be allowed even if the original is non-standard. I quite like getting to see these idiosyncrasies, as part of the history of the original book as a physical object and process of publication, and I'm inclined to try to preserve some of the weirdness rather than standardising everything—but I think the switching quote styles may be a bit too confusing.
The actual quality of the printing is also not the best (though that may be partly the scans). Words are occasionally obscured, and it's very difficult to tell the difference between different accents on letters—which appear fairly often in Hungarian, German, a bit of French, etc. words, which I keep having to look up to make sure I'm getting them right. Happily—as I have learnt from trying to figure this out—Hungarian at least only uses acute accents, not grave or circumflex, so I know that fake-Budapest is correctly Szent-Istvánhely.
Anyway, in the midst of all this I'm very much enjoying the book itself. I think paying so much attention to the text is getting me to appreciate it more—the emotions in the first part are so quietly lovely, and I absolutely love how it sounds so exactly like how merely subtexual/slashy books from the same period often sound, using such similar phrases and details... but this time it stops being subtextual.
( A couple of favourite quotes, idiosyncratic formatting included )
