[tei-council] [Fwd: Library SIG recommendations]

[David Sewell]

I trust we can have a couple of days to look all this over?

Re the soft-hyphen issue:

On Thu, 23 Apr 2009, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:

> > * Documentation on "soft" vs. "hard" hyphens: it was pointed out that
> > though the Tite docs required that vendors maintain the difference
> > between these in transcriptions, it didn't specify *how* to do so. The
> > suggestion was to use the SOFT HYPHEN character (U+00AD) to transcribe
> > soft hyphens, and the Western-keyboard default hyphen, the
> > HYPHEN-MINUS (U+002D), for hard hyphens. (This entails no change to
> > the schemaSpec.)
>
> I am surprised keyboarding firms can tell
> the difference between hard and soft, but the recommendation
> seems plausible.

Keyboarding vendors are accustomed to dealing with line-end hyphenation
per customer spec. In some cases they retain all printed hyphens as hard
hyphens, in other cases they remove "soft hyphens" via dictionary
algorithms and are usually asked to preserve a file showing their
decisions. The soft-hyphen option is a third way. Of course customers
need to check vendor decisions on "soft" vs. "hard" as there are
inevitable mistakes, especially with older or non-English texts.

-- 
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 801079, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
Courier: 310 Old Ivy Way, Suite 302, Charlottesville VA 22903
Email: dsewell at virginia.edu   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
Web: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/