Text formatting

“ While non-fiction is not in principle any more difficult to format than fiction, many non-fiction books have lots of features like illustrations, tables, section sub-headings and footnotes, that require some extra work on the part of the producer. If the illustrations are essential, you should consider adding a HTML format file to allow you to present them.
See the page image nonfic.tif. This presents many formatting changes: the centered title will go to the left; the italicized chapter contents will become regular text, and the em-dashes will become "—" ”

“ We have scans, more options for text formatting, hyperlinks and on and on. We are not the bare minimum; although I think we should offer that too, maybe finally allowing .txt files to download unformatted plain text for the works. Using PG as comparison is not right; it's means to providing content is somewhat different; at greatest length by our index/proofreading feature. I clicked on 10 different works, and for whatever reason, all led back to PG.. And the news site, like it has been said above, they have caps on line length generally! ”

“ When a text needs a lot of non-standard formatting or markup, you really need to ask yourself whether you shouldn't be submitting it in HTML, with all the bells and whistles, and settle for something more normal in the text variant. ”

“ Put the formatting commands that you want to appear in the transclusion in the body, and use the header and footer sections to apply the remaining formatting to the individual pages. For example, you could mark up three Page: pages as
Page 1 Body: Start formatting Text Footer: End formatting Page 2 Header: Start formatting Body Text Footer End formatting Page 2 Header: Start formatting Body Text End formatting Since the headers and footers don't get transcluded, the mainspace transclusion ends up looking like
Start formatting Text Text Text End formatting Hope that helps. ”

“ It's mostly up to the editors' discretion how closely they care to try to reproduce the formatting of the printed text. It is however good to be consistent within a work. Either changing this page and all future pages that have those lines to use that specially formatted line, or change the title page to use a normal rule ({{rule|width=120px}}) would be a solution. ”

“ Where a simple, standard PG-ASCII layout does not, in your view, "adequately express the content", you should think of making your text in another open format, perhaps HTML or XML or TeX, that allows you to use more characters, more formatting options, and images. We are always happy to accept these kinds of files. In these cases, you should also provide a standard PG-ASCII version, even if you feel it is unacceptably degraded, for those who cannot use your preferred format. ”

“ Showing how it should be done, rather than describing how it should be done, will make it clear to everyone. We are arguing over contradictory wording on multiple RFCs and essays and draft policy pages. One good example will make it clear. I am still not sure if the "complete unannotated version" you are referring to is the scan of the original document, or we are supposed to cut and paste the text twice in every entry, one with links and one without links. Are formatting changes also annotations? Is choosing the text size for a headline changing the urgency of a news article? ”

“ Can you clarify what you see as problematic? I took the liberty of adding "alt=T" for the T image, FWIW. (I'm hoping/assuming this is noncontroversial; see w:Wikipedia:Alternative text for images, .) -- Visviva (talk) 03:38, 25 March 2011 (UTC) That formatting would generally be considered contrary to our formatting guidance as we don't wish to force pages to form to a printed page construct. People viewing the web have different configurations (monitors, browsers, fonts, font sizes, ..., even devices) so forcing page widths and word wraps is problematic. ”

“ In 2002, plain vanilla ASCII is still readable everywhere, but people also want to convert our texts into other formats for more convenient loading on readers and web sites. We therefore have to keep in mind that our works will be processed by automatic conversion programs, none of which is perfect, and we have evolved some "defensive formatting" practices, which, while retaining the universality of plain text, also supply clues to automatic converters about how they should treat the layout. These do help to keep converters from making at least the worst mistakes. ”

“ I've done it for page 8 and 9. -- Contrapunctus-1 (talk) 08:56, 24 March 2020 (UTC) Separating semantic and formatting information I'd like to separate the semantic markup of text (e.g. "chapter title") , and that of how it should be displayed (e.g. a specific font size, style, and alignment for all chapter titles) , in hope of better exporting to other targets, like LaTeX. Is this viable on Wikisource? From reading around, dynamic layouts seem closest...is this correct, or are there better ways? ”

“ Hrishikes (talk) 07:00, 7 September 2015 (UTC) This really is an adjunct to Hrishikes remarks: See {{=}} for one approach. Another is demonstrated on your page: choose the innermost formatting template surrounding the offending equals sign and insert "1=" (or whatever is appropriate to that template) in front of the string being formatted. This forces wikisource to treat all of that text up to the first "|" or ""}}" as being a single value not to be further broken down. (In case this is not already obvious the "=" upsets the system because it tries to treat it as a parameter assignment.) ”

“ So, we could establish a separate scale for formatting, so as not to detract from the text's quality in terms of completeness and reliability. As for sourcing, there's no way a work can be 75% without including the source edition of the work, it wont meet the "checked with a reference edition" criteria. But we need input from more users on this, because it seems this discussion is leaning towards increasing our standards of quality for texts, something I'm all for, but others might see as too much given the project's current condition. ”

“ Sound good. Perhaps first save as RTF format and upload that to http://pastebin.com (or a file sharing service of your choice) and I can hopefully make a script handle the formatting as well. If I can't handle that, I'll come back to you! Inductiveload—talk/contribs 17:59, 28 November 2017 (UTC) @Inductiveload: 1) My text needed a lot of proofing. 2) It was from a different edition so I made it to match yours... except no papers supplementary. 3) I went ahead and formatted for WS italics and small caps. 4) Uploaded to pastebin.com entitled V1 TOC in some textual format.txt. ”

“ It would be more appropriate over at Wikisource:Biography.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 22:48, 12 August 2006 (UTC) <poem> tag I noticed you added a "" tag, but it didn't appear to affect the text's appearance, so i reverted it. Is it a MediaWiki-specific tag? Because I've never heard of it. 216.195.148.149 01:16, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Yes. It makes no automatic changes to the text, but it makes formatting poems easier. Any line breaks in the edit box are kept on the display page (meaning we don't have to use
tags) , and allows us to do text formatting (creating links, italics, etc.) . ”

“ Templates are shortcuts placed within sets of double curly brackets to perform various functions throughout Wikisource. As you proofread and edit texts in Wikisource, you can use templates to aid in formatting, navigation, and a variety of other tasks.
Formatting Templates Formatting templates are used to change the way that text displays when being read. ”

“ Because of the quality of the microcopy, the transcription was checked against a copy owned by Fordham University, a digitized version of which is posted by the Internet Archive at:
archive.org/details/TroughtonShortSweet
In general, this transcription attempts to retain the formatting, punctuation and spelling of the source text. Thus, variant spellings such as “lieve,” “doat,” “one’self,” and “extacies” as well as words and spellings intended for comic effect such as “horrorble” and “tremengeous” have been retained. ”

“ References from elsewhere, and the (q.v.) links, could be deep linked /B#Blake, Bill instead of /Blake, Bill. It makes it more browsable and gives some context to the entries, As others have done it differently the options are more complex, having both is possible I suppose. I did some of the formatting, replacing bold with smallcaps, for the 'Ba' entries in the example. I forgot to add '—' and remove the fullcaps. A script in a text editor would handle this while you have the edit window open, my slack version wrapped the dates which would be problematic if there is a 'c.' or 'd.' in there. ”

“ Best thing to do is to use
for line endings within a block of text and then outdent, hanging indent &c. work. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 01:24, 19 August 2013 (UTC) Um... a hanging indent assumes the text will wrap, but a poem tag assumes it won't. Either you want the text to wrap or you don't, so there should never be a time those two formatting items are used together on the same text. Just start the poem tag near the bottom, with the block where it's appropriate, instead of trying to get the line breaks in specific locations for the first several paragraphs. ”

“ This block of text is formatted with both a left margin and a hanging indent
Character formatting To drop the initial character of a paragraph, use {{dropinitial}}. To replicate a large initial character that does not descend into the paragraph, use {{largeinitial}}
To replicate a inline straight line (usually indicating missing or redacted text) use {{bar}} as multiple m-dashes sometimes render as a dashed line.
To create a large brace spanning multiple lines of text, use {{brace}} or {{brace2}}. "brace" is limited to use with or in a table, "brace2" may be used anywhere. ”

“ Hi there, In response to your question, I would say my main problem with the templates, and why I edited the page, is that the output they produce is inconsistent with what appear to be the general rules for formatting author pages (i.e. Title of work in italics, date in brackets, and if work is a part of a larger, such as a poem in a collection of poems, work title in normal font and enclosed in quotation marks.) ”

“ Rich Text Format was originally a Microsoft specification, but it is an open format that is used by many word processors to exchange text and format information in an application-independent way. Nearly all current word processors will read and edit an RTF file, and, like HTML, it can also be edited as plain text. ”

“ Even when poetry doesn't have indented lines, it is a good idea to indent quotations embedded in prose. Remember, others will be converting your text later—to HTML, to PDA reader formats, to formats that don't even exist yet—and much of this conversion will be done automatically, by computer programs. It is very hard for a program to know when it can and can't re-wrap lines to fit a screen size unless it has a clear signal that this line should not be wrapped. ”

“ Do you have an opinion on what is optimal, or should we let people keep experimenting for a while? Article titles have no standard, some have years, some have full dates. Articles themselves are a mixture of djvu files, jpg index pages, raw unformatted ASCII text, and formatted Unicode/HTML text. ”

“ The primary purpose of all printing is to be read. Anything that adds to the legibility of the printing improves it; anything that detracts from its legibility harms it. How can we so divide words that the legibility and intelligibility of the text will be maintained, the line justified to register, and the beauty of the page enhanced? These ends—legibility, intelligibility, and beauty—are the aims of all the rules which have been devised for the division of words. ”

“ Minor elements of the page may contribute beauty or ugliness according to their handling: the headline and page number, their character and position; notes marginal or indented, footnotes; chapter headings and initials; catch-words; borders, head and tail pieces, vignettes, ornamental rules. Even the spacing of initials is a task for the skilled craftsman. Some printers go so far as to miter or shave the type-body of initials to make them, when printed, seem to cling more closely to the following text. Indenting, above all in poetry, is a feature strongly affecting the beauty of the page. ”

“ Being able to edit the file is also important. We make corrections to our editions constantly, and it is important to us that we should be able to update our files easily. If adding one word to a sentence involves a complete re-marking of the whole text and a complete rebuild of the file, we have to ask ourselves whether this format is really necessary for this text. Further, the people who re-use our texts should also be allowed to copy and reformat them freely, and non-editable formats restrict their ability to do this in various ways. ”

“ For examples on ro.wikisource, see ro:Categorie:Index. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 23:53, 8 February 2017 (UTC) Does formatting have to be fully faithful to the original? I ask because I've already done partial digitization of a book elsewhere. I want to continue it here but my work reformats the original slightly to be more legible (IMO) for the 21st century: link vs. link. Suzukaze-c (talk) 21:10, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
Yes and No: When we transcribe in the Page namespace, as you are currently doing, we want to match the formatting of the original as closely as is possible and reasonable. ”