micro-OCP, cont. (57)
Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@VM.EPAS.UTORONTO.CA)
Wed, 15 Feb 89 21:00:01 EST
Humanist Mailing List, Vol. 2, No. 609. Wednesday, 15 Feb 1989.
Date: Wed, 15 Feb 89 11:35 PST
From: Sterling Bjorndahl - Claremont Graduate School
Subject: re: Hyphens in Micro-OCP: at the ends of pages
Susan Hockey says:
> The only other occasion where hyphens might occur
> before a COCOA reference is at a page boundary, but a hyphen as the last
> character on a page is not good typography.
What about the following scenario? I have taken over responsibility
for the machine readable form of the Nag Hammadi Coptic Gnostic texts
as they have been produced here in Claremont. Since most of the texts
are represented in only one manuscript, the original editors decided
to keep the machine readable form of the texts using the same line and
page breaks as the manuscript. In other words, we have an edition of
the *papyri*, not just an edition of the *texts*. This means that we
have many hyphenated words, including quite a number at the bottom of
pages, and many hyphenated words partially in lacunae or otherwise
interrupted with TLG-type "escape sequences," e.g., where X represents
a Coptic character and [] surround lacunae (and ~ starts a TLG-style
citation line):
XXX ... XXXX-
~2.3.1
XXX ...
or
XXX ... XX[XXX]-
XXX ...
or
[XXX] ... XXX-
[XX XX]XX ...
or some combination of the above.
Was it a mistake to do an edition of the papyri and to try to maintain
line and page integrity, and to indicate lacunae? We need some way of
knowing page and line numbers, since that is the only way most of
these texts are cited. Should we convert the whole thing to SGML -
will we be able to keep all the information that we have currently
coded in TLG compatible codes? But we want to stay as close as
possible to TLG coding so that software used for TLG will need to be
modified only minimally to deal with Coptic. It seems to me to be not
unreasonable to expect software to be intelligent enough to deal with
these situations as they stand.
Sterling Bjorndahl
Institute for Antiquity and Christianity
Claremont, California