ewx: (Default)
Richard Kettlewell ([personal profile] ewx) wrote2012-04-05 09:19 am
Entry tags:

Old English and Its Closest Relatives

Addendum to previous post: don’t get the electronic version; someone did an especially terrible job of converting it from paper. Faults include:

  • Some of the non-ASCII characters are represented as images. This means that they don’t scale with the rest of the text, leading to a bizarre appearance.
  • Most of the tables are represented as images. Not only does this have the same scaling problem as above but worse, the ones that started out life as a full page aren’t very high resolution, making them quite hard to read.
  • Some of those images are the wrong one.
  • Some of the text is wrong, for instance there’s the occasional “p” for “þ”.
  • The ancient texts are missing hyphens at intraword line breaks, which are nevertheless preserved from the paper version, presenting an additional challenge to would-be translators. If I wanted to puzzle out essentially typographical issues I’d have gone to the originals!

Most of this is, in principle, user-fixable but it’s a lot of work. I bought a second-hand paper copy.

[identity profile] hoiho.livejournal.com 2012-04-05 10:09 am (UTC)(link)
Would I be right in reading "electronic version" as "Kindle version"? All the rubbish you mention seem to be endemic in Kindle conversions, which are clearly done by quick and dirty OCRing of paper copies, resulting in myriad typos, and the dumping anything complicated to images.
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[identity profile] ewx.livejournal.com 2012-04-05 10:12 am (UTC)(link)
y.