Help to transcribe Paul Otlet’s Traité de Documentation (1934) from PDF to a digital full-text edition. No easily readable edition of his works is currently accessible online. While more and more books and articles are published about the “visionary of the digital age”, the original sources remain accessible only to those who are willing to download or browse a 200 MB PDF-file and understand French.
The first goal is to produce a digital edition of the Traité in readable plain text, using the lightweight markup Markdown syntax, following the conventions of Pandoc, CommonMark and the syntax additions of Textus. In fact, the electronic edition, file conversion processes and copy editing of the manuscript, as conducted in this repository, serve as a demo for the Textus publication platform.
The end goal is the generation, publication and distribution of an electronic edition in the HTML5 and PDF formats, again using the Textus platform.
The current version of the Markdown version can be found at https://github.com/textvs/traite . The rendered version will be available at http://demos.textus.io/Otlet/Traite .
To contribute to this effort just get a copy of the PDF of University of Ghent, open a text editor and start correcting the mistakes of the OCR run according to the rules layed out below.
Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (1868–1944) was a Belgian author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer and peace activist; he is one of several people who have been considered the father of information science, a field he called “documentation”. Otlet created the Universal Decimal Classification, one of the most prominent examples of faceted classification. … Outlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize the world’s knowledge, culminating in two books, the Traité de Documentation (1934) and Monde: Essai d’universalisme (1935). — From: Wikipedia
The book is considered a landmark in the history of information science, with concepts predicting the rise of the World Wide Web and search engines. — From: Wikipedia
- Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/OtletTraitDocumentationUgent
- OpenLibrary.org: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1112871W/Traite%CC%81_de_documentation
- Gent University:
- https://www.google.co.in/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=inauthor:%22Paul+Otlet%22
- http://wikisource.org
- http://traduwiki.org/
- https://www.transifex.com/
- http://crowdin.net/pricing
- https://poeditor.com/
- http://www.hasecke.eu/Members/juh/sphinx-a-tool-for-self-publisher
- https://www.discovermeteor.com/blog/community-translations-with-github-middleman-codeship-heroku/
- http://annotatedbooksonline.com
Translation:
- Pages are separated by horizontal rules “====” surrounded by two empty lines above and one blank line below the rule.
- After a single blank line, page numbers, section/chapter titles and section numbers should be placed just as in the PDF, pages in italics (surrounded by
*asterisks.) - The two columns on each page are separated by “——” surrounded by two single blank lines.
- Header markup should be one symbol longer than the header text
- Unicode characters should be used wherever possible, but should be documented somewhere
- The original text, layout and typesetting should be represented as close as possible within the limits of the reStructuredText format.
- Hyphenation: What is a good solution to somehow mark a hyphenation from the book in the reST format without it showing up in the compiled html? Leaving hyphenation in the reST would destroy full-text search. But single dashes (
-) at the end of the line are easy to remove with a script. Soft-hyphens can be used to replace the hyphenation so that it doesn’t show up in the browser. An open question is how this will affect the epub output of Sphinx. - If the PDF resolution is not good enough to discriminate symbols accurately, just place three bold question marks ??? (surround them with two asterisks
**???**) in this position.
see also: http://character-code.com/french-html-codes.php
« .. » left and right angle quotes
― Horizontal rule (use above footnotes)
– EN Dash
— EM Dash
see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash
The source files are encoded in unicode format (UTF–8 without BOM). To check the encoding on Windows, use the excellent http://notepad-plus-plus.org editor.
To input specific letters or symbols:
Ubuntu12: Shift+AltGr + ^ + e = ê
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%92 U+0152 OEvre Œ, Kleinbuchstabe œ U+0153
Multiplication sign: × (Unicode 215)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ComposeKey Unicode composition: Another means to enter characters is to enter them as Unicode character number.
Press Shift+Ctrl+U, release U, enter the hexadecimal (0123456789abcdef) Unicode character code point, then release Shift+Ctrl. An underlined u followed by the number will be displayed as you type.
Alternatively, press (and release) Shift+Ctrl+U, then, while underlined u is displayed, enter the hexadecimal Unicode character code point followed by .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_input
Windows: http://superuser.com/questions/47420/insert-unicode-characters-via-the-keyboard