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Author: Sean Crist (Swarthmore College)
Email: scrist1 at swarthmore dot edu
Date: 2004-09-21 17:04:08
Subject: Re: Tabulations

> Hi again
>
> Another question about the Cleasby/Vigfusson. Within the most important entries (marked in capital letters), it's common to find tabulation (tabs) spaces between definitions.
>
> You can find an example in b0021 (pdf), line 7, within the text for the 'and-vari' entry. There you have a tab between 'and-vari, a, m.' and 'I. a fish'...
>
> The question is: should I mark the tabulation somehow in the corrected text or ignore it? It seems to be ignored in the pages corrected by Michael O'Keefe, but anyway I'd like to check with people over there... :)
>
> Thank you!

Good question. The short answer is: just enter any space as a single space, even if it's a really wide one (as with the tabs you refer to).

Here's the rationale. The long-term goal is to produce a version of the dictionary marked up to show its logical structure (using a standard set of tags known as the TEI set). The tabs in this text appear to be placed in a completely predictable way: the typesetters have included a tab before every roman numeral which starts one of the numbered definitions within an entry. Since this placement is completely predictable and adds no information to the entry, it's OK not to encode it. (And if somebody _does_ want the tabs, they will be able to tell their software to add the tabs back in automatically based on how the entries are marked up with TEI tags.)

However, this is another one of those things you don't really need to be too picky about. Tabs and spaces are just "whitespace" which can be automatically normalized to single spaces after the hand-corrections are done, using a single search-and-replace. So if you enter two spaces in a row, it's not a problem; it'll get fixed in the end.

Thanks again for posting your questions to the board.

--Sean

Messages in this threadNameCollege/UniversityDate
Tabulations Raul Vallejo 2004-09-21 10:32:29
Re: Tabulations Sean Crist Swarthmore College 2004-09-21 17:04:08