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Marking up an e-text I.This section tells you about the content of an e-text and also gives a brief description of how a book is organized. The next sections will go into the actual detail of how to mark up a book. You may want to print out these sections for easy reference. The parts of an e-textWhen you down load an e-text you will see that it consists of the following parts.
Our task will be to preserve all the original structure while adding meaning to it using mark up. The following figure illustrates the parts of an e-text graphically. We will also add two additional parts.
This is illustrated in the following figure Let's now look at the parts of a book The parts of a bookAlmost any book or document can be divided up into three parts
The following paragraphs are a brief account of these divisions, as they most commonly are seen in a modern publication. It should be remembered that not all books will include all these divisions, and many will have extra divisions that are not easily described. When you encounter these you must use your native wits to decide how to mark up the document! These descriptions are adapted for the most part from "The Chicago Manual of Style" ( The University of Chicago Press ), a book well worth investing in if you have an interest in authoring or typography in general. Book frontmatterThe Half-Title pageThe half title page usually only carries the title of the book Title pageThe title page contains the title, any sub tile and information about the Author, also other information such as the edition number , the publisher etc. Copyright pageThis contains a whole lot of information in a modern text. In historic texts much of the usual information is missing, and indeed a copyright page may not even be present. DedicationIf present, this will usually be on its own page. EpigraphThis may be a pertinent quotation or statement. Table of contentsThese are usually kept separate from the other tables. The actual page numbers are of no meaning in e-texts and are often omitted. List of IllustrationsIn more modern books these may be subdivided into various types such as plates, illustrations, figures, and maps. List of TablesSee above ToC List of MapsIn older books these were often kept separate from the illustrations. ForewordA foreword is an introduction by someone other than the author, and is often some famous person. Preface and AcknowledgmentsThis may include the motivation for writing the book, and the help received from various sources IntroductionThis includes material that is related to the main text of the book and which should be read before the rest of the book Other Front matter
The book bodyThe body of the book itself consists of the text, maps and illustrations of the book. The simplest division is in to a chapter, with each chapter containing a chapter title, or possibly a chapter number, and a number paragraphs. The paragraphs may be divided into subsections. Most of the e-texts will not have illustrations. If you wish to
add an illustration from the original text then you can, but great
care must be taken that it is from the original text, and not added
in some recent addition. We would suggest the use of the ChaptersA chapter may have a title or a number. Often a chapter will be preceded by a quotation or a summary. Subsections and subheads should be preserved. SubheadsSome chapters may have several levels of subsections. If this is the case care must be taken to preserve the hierarchy in the markup. FootnotesFootnotes and side notes if present need to be marked as such. With illustrations, some need to occur in the text, i.e. their position is meaningful, and they need to appear inline at the point of PartsA large book may be broken down into parts. when this is the case, often each part is given it's own title page. Sometimes the chapter numbering starts gain from 1. other divisionsPoetryPoems usually have titles. The preservation of white space is important, and markup should clearly indicate the divisions in the poetry. Letters and DiariesLetters are usually listed in chronological order rather than in chapters. PlaysPlays have their own special markup's and division, and in many cases (e.g. Shakespeare) the markup will have much in common with poetry. Epilogues, Afterwords and ConclusionsThese are unnumbered. Sometimes however they can be almost as long as the chapters themselves. Keep the same formatting for these as you do for the chapters. Book backmatterAppendicesLike Chapters these can have titles, numbers and subsections. GlossaryA list of terms with their definitions Bibliography or Reference listA list of suitable reading matter IndexAn index is a list of items with page references. In an e-text of course the page references, if present will bear no relationship to the text. This is usually omitted in e-texts. ColophonA colophon may be an embellishment, or it may be a brief description of the facts of production. Revision History (Marking up an e-text I)Original material prepared by: Author: Frank Boumphrey date: 1/13/00 email: frank@hwg.org for: HWG Project Gutenberg © The HTML Writers Guild |