This is the file "standard.gut" which contains many suggestions
how to prepare an Etext for release by Project Gutenberg.
 
Remember:  these are only suggestions.  People send us files in
a variety of formats, and we are most glad to a little work for
the purpose of getting them into an easy to read onscreen form.
 
Last updated 10/23/93
 
If you are interesting in editing, please ask for details on an
extraordinary effort we are making to prepare Etexts in manners
which will enhance both the readability and searchability of an
Etext by the elimination of hyphenation and of widow/orphans on
a line by line basis.  This takes a bit of work, but it results
in and Etext much easier to read than the paper book from which
it was taken.  Please ask for "editing.gut".
 
[editing.gut is currently appended to the bottom of this file.]
 
Obviously, the first thing to do to make sure your chosen books
are clear of copyright restrictions.  We will be happy to do an
assortment of copyright searches and write clearance letters.
 
When you start preparing the Etext, after getting the copyright
clearance finished:
 
Please preface the file with your name, address, phone, & email.
 
Each line of your book should end with a "hard return" = cr/lf.
In DOS if you save as a DOS Text File, this is the default.
On Macs, each line needs to end with "end of paragraph marker"
In UNIX, each line needs to end with ^M.
 
This is VERY important in establishing the margination, as per
the new editing policy mentioned above.
 
We try to average 65, with 55 to 75 being short and long
other than for emergencies, which will extend to 51 to 79.
 
 
You can look over any of the Project Gutenberg Etexts to see a
series of examples of how this works.  You may notice how much
easier it is to read the latest novels [such as Burroughs] due
to the elimination of hyphenation, and the remargination of an
assortment of lines that previous were split with words on the
preceding or following lines that should have been on the same
line. . .but were moved for the convenience of the publishers.
 
 
The entire work should start with the title and end with
"End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Name of Book"
Then three returns.
 
We would like page numbers at the left column
for proofreading purposes.
 
Priorities go with the more important type headers.
i.e. from end of Chapter to beginning of Part, use Part
 
Title and Part type headers--5 returns after 6 before
Chapter headers--3 returns before first line.
Chapter ends--4 returns before next chapter header.
Wide paragraph separation--3 returns.
Normal paragraph separation--2 returns.
End of line----one return.
(These are "hard" returns, not "soft" returns.)
 
 
Don't worry if you can't do all this, or can't do it easily.
We expect to have to spend about ten hours on each book from
the time we start editing it until it is ready for releasing
on the networks.  Adding the hard returns et. al. is an easy
part of that process, so don't feel obliged.
 
Actually, in 1994 we will have to cut this to five hours, or
your erstwhile editor will die under the strain.
 
Also, for those concerned about space. . .even if an average
paragraph in your book is only 100 characters, the additions
of the hard returns will only make the book a percent longer
in the end.
 
 
 
We would like to receive these files in a PLAIN ASCII format
and if compressed, please use ZIP if you can.  We could help
you find it, if necessary.  We prefer not to use TAR and Z--
but we will if necessary. . .we would prefer to receive just
one large PLAIN ASCII file and ZIP it ourselves, rather than
the various chapters, subdirectories, etc. with TAR.Z files.
 
Please name files with standard DOS filename.ext,
that is eight character filname and three for extension.
 
 
 
*General suggestions for the preparations of Project Gutenberg Etexts*
 
In more detail than what was presented above.
 
Editing policy for margination/widows/orphans is at bottom.
 
Your suggestions for rewrites of this file gratefully accepted.
 
 
0.  Please put your name, email, and other contact information
    INSIDE THE FILES YOU SEND, AT THE TOP.  You may not believe
    how often we get files and cannot contact the sender to get
    details on the edition, etc.
 
1.  Let us do the copyright clearance for you.
 
2.  Remove vestigial traces of paper publishing.
    A.  Page numbers [maybe the last thing to go, for reference]
        [sometimes they are required, so we leave them in]
    B.  Hyphens at the end of lines, unless true hyphenated word
    C.  Widows and orphans [at page, paragraph, and line levels]
    D.  Remove or mark typos. [but not intentional misspellings,
        and leave in intentionally bad grammar]
 
Spacing:
 
    E.  Two spaces after each sentence [watch for ! or ? that do
        NOT end sentences, then use only one space].
    F.  One blank line after each paragraph. [two cr/lf returns]
        [If you can't do this easily, just separate each para
        with "**" to simlate the "hard returns"]
    G.  Two blank lines after each section [wide paper breaks]
    H.  Four blank lines after each chapter
    I.  Three blank lines after chapter headers.
    J.  Elipses [word. . .] have no spaces before or after ".'s"
        unless they end a sentence with four [. . . .  ] then it
        is a sentence ending. . .with two spaces. . . .  Next is
        a new sentence.
    K.  Dashes will be--dashes--with no extra spaces around them
        [this has been discussed at great length and changed one
        or two times already.  I have heard great argumentations
        from both sides [_I_ preferred the spaces] but I finally
        decided on not having them because more people wanted it
        that way and because it looked more like the books [also
        it saves a few spaces here and there in the files].
 
 
3.  Try for 99.9 to 99.99% accuracy.
 
4.  Swap proofreading with others from the volunteers list, keep
    your reading fresh. . .once you miss an error it is a likely
    thing that you will miss it again.
 
5.  Poems and indented quotations within paragraphs:
    Please try to make this look as much like the book so it can
    be determined by the reader whether this is a separate part,
    part of the same paragraph or what.  Feel free to use indent
    and blank lines to accomplish this.
 
6.  Most people use "quotes" but those who are sticklers for
    ``open'' and ``close'' quotes use these.  Gets hairy if you say:
 
    Harry said, ``'Twas the night before Christmas''
    Harry said, "'Twas the night before Christmas"  is fine,
    [not to mention that many keyboards and programs require
    an extra ` to get one on the screen, so right now I have
    to type ```` to get just `` on the screen.  When a doubt
    occurs, just do what you think the average searcher goes
    searching for.  Please include a note at the top of your
    files indicating any of these you were unsure about.
 
 
What we need most in proofreading are people to readjust those margins
after the hyphens have been removed, and to adjust line lengths in the
places where phrases, lines, and paragraphs have widows and orphans.
 
We try to average 65, with 55 to 75 being short and long
other than for emergencies, which will extend to 51 to 79.
 
If this it NOT what you want to do, PLEASE don't let me force you into
such a thing.  It is something I can do, and can probably teach others
to do, but I STRONGLY prefer NOT to ask people to do slave labor.  The
editing of this nature makes the Etexts much easier to read and search
with nearly any program and computer, which is a major part of Project
Gutenberg's goal. . .to get the books to EVERYONE.
 
I know that I have a particular talent for margination, that comes out
without apparent effort sometimes, as you might notice in the message.
That talent is probably the only reason I ever decided this editing is
possible, but I CAN tell you that I can't do more than about 100 pages
a day of it, and that in eight separate shifts with rest in between.
 
However, when I think of the millions or billions of people who should
be able to use these books only one decade from now [after 22 years on
the job] it is hard for me NOT to do this editing, as I think Etext is
going to be a much better medium than paper ever was and should not be
relegated to "copying paper" inclusive of all the problems paper might
cause as a medium [even though we are used to them].  Some scholars in
the Etext and paper reprint field even feel that typographical errors,
along with hyphenation and pagination, should be preserved.
 
Etext as developed and distributed by Project Gutenberg since 1971 was
never intended to be a copy of a paper or a parchment [remember, first
Project Gutenberg Etext was typed in from parchment replicas of the US
Declaration of Independence].
 
The major puposes of Project Gutenberg have always been:
 
1.  to encourage the creation and distribution of electronic texts for
    the general audience.
 
2.  to provide these Etexts in a manner available to everyone in terms
    of price and accessibility [i.e. no special hardware or software],
    and no price tag attached to the Etexts themselves.
 
3.  to make the Etexts as readily usable as possible, with no forms or
    other paperwork required, and as easily readable to the human eyes
    as to computer programs, and in fact, more readable than paper.
 
4.  to encourage the doubling of creation and distribution every year,
    so as to put 10,000 Etexts into general circulation by December 31
    of the year 2001.
 
 
For those of you who are not terribly interested in the editing of the
books into formats to improve onscreen reading and searchin, you might
want to stop here, as the following pertains mostly to editing in this
new methodology.  Hopefully, Etexts will allow us to exorcise the old,
no longer necessary methods the publishers have used to get more words
on to fewer pages, and to eliminate end of line hyphenations, and also
to reconnect many phrases and sentences that were previously broken up
in this same process of moving away from manuscript form.  Please also
realize that the examples below will look as if they orginally had the
ragged margination you see here, while a quick look at the paper books
will show you their marginations were perfectly neat.  This is part of
the same process called "proportional spacing" in which the publishers
make an even greater effort to adjust the words to their own formats--
a process in which the letters are squeezed more closely together, for
the purpose of saving more paper, or sometimes spread further apart to
eliminate a particularly awful phraseology or "widow/orphan" problem.
 
Eventually authors will finally have control over their own works, and
will actually be able to create their books in finished published form
just the way they want them.
 
 
For those books we already have in print and in Etext, we hope to help
create editions that are more readable, by trying to a job of "reverse
engineering" to arrive at a book somewhat more resembling what authors
intended in the first place.  Given the information authors have given
us in response to our questions about how the printed book looked in a
comparison to what they had intended, it is HIGHLY UNLIKLEY that these
efforts are going to be exactly what the authors had in mind, but this
should not keep us from trying to move in that direction.
 
 
New editing policy for margination/widows/orphans.
 
Here is an example of an original paragraph from the introduction
to The House of Seven Gables, followed by two possible revisions:
 
As I received it after being edited and proofed several times:
 
In September of the year during the February of which Hawthorne
had completed "The Scarlet Letter," he began "The House of the
Seven Gables."  Meanwhile, he had removed from Salem to Lenox,
in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where he occupied with his
family a small red wooden house, still standing at the date of
this edition, near the Stockbridge Bowl.
 
The margins in that paragraph are very even, nearly perfect as
a matter of fact, with only the first line haveing 63 letters,
and the rest having 62.  However the title of the book is done
in such a manner as to leave two words on the next line, which
is NOT a real flaw, I am only doing this as an example:
 
Here is another margination of the same paragraph which I have
chosen as a rather extreme example, so you can easily see what
has been under discussion for so long.
 
In September of the year during the February of which Hawthorne had
completed "The Scarlet Letter," he began "The House of the Seven Gables."
Meanwhile, he had removed from Salem to Lenox, in Berkshire County,
Massachusetts, where he occupied with his family a small red wooden house,
still standing at the date of this edition, near the Stockbridge Bowl.
 
This margination is much more ragged, with an average of about
70 characters per line, with the longest being 74 and shortest
of a length of 67.  Thus, no line is longer than three letters
longer than 71, and no line is shorter than than amount.  This
is pretty good aritmetically, probably better than we will get
on the average, in our average book.
 
However, the point of all this effort was to get the phrases a
bit more cohesive, so that every line except one ended in some
punctuation mark, and made reasonable sense.  Of course, I was
stumped by the long word Massachusetts, and ended up with this
word separating towns and county on one line, and state on the
next line.  In a perfect world, I could have rewritten all the
material to get the same meaning across, and with margins that
were entirely justified. . .but we all know that is beyond the
scope of what we are talking about.  The books have to remain,
and should remain, the most accurate transcription of what any
author was trying to say, but we can improve the publications,
by doing a better job of editing, of proofreading, and margins
of course, as we have been discussing.
 
The point of all this is to try to eliminate widows or orphans
as they are called. . .cases in which one word is left on that
line, while the main clause, phrase, sentence, paragraph, page
or whatever is left above, or on the previous page.
 
What we would LIKE to do, is to make Project Gutenberg books a
bit easier to read, and much easier for search programs with a
policy of editing that eliminates as much of the hyphenations,
paginations, and marginations of the publishing process; leave
a book that is not shredding the words at the ends of lines so
as to save one or two pages at the end of the book. . .this is
more valuable than you might think to a publisher for whom the
process could save millions of pages per year, but it is going
the way of the dinosaur as publication is moving from paper to
Etext publications.
 
Adding blank lines between paragraphs makes them a much easier
target for the human eye, and takes only one character:  while
indentation takes from two to ten characters in the Etexts our
staff has already prepared.  Thus we can save space while eyes
are given their just due, words that are easy to read AND easy
to see in their proper phraseology.
 
I admit that adding a blank space between sentences takes up a
bit more space, but it makes the sentences so much easier when
you are reading them.  Of course, unless indentation is slight
AND there are lots of sentences per paragraph, the whole thing
comes out taking less space.
 
This is something new, and we are still working on it; example
paragraphs such as the one above cannot substitute for example
books, such as the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars series which were
recently posted, and the Red Badge of Courage.  Compare a book
from the library to the Project Gutenberg Edition and you will
see just how many changes we have made and how much better the
book reads.  Of course, those who are inculcated to reading in
the publishers' styles to the maximum degree will feel less of
an improvement, simply because they have learned to ignore all
of the extra hassles created by publishers' styles, which were
developed to benefit the publishers, and not to made the books
more readable.
 
We are working on a C PROGRAM to do larger and larger parts of
this work.  If you are interested in helping write or test the
output of this program, please contact:
 
 Userid: geof
   Node: krypton.stanford.edu
   Name: Geof Pawlicki
 
who is coordinating this effort and writing the program.
 
Once again our many thanks to all the volunteers who have done
so much to help Project Gutenberg bring Etext to the world.
 
 
Here are a few examples of how a paragraph might be edited for
Etext presentation.  The first paragraph is what appeared in a
paper edition of a book, and the following variations are just
changes in which words appear on which lines.  You will see an
assortment of possible approaches which might be used to put a
particular sentence or phrase back together after it was split
for the publishers' convenience to fit inexpensively on paper.
 
Since blank paper costs money, the publishers have tried to do
their best to get as many words as possible on each line, then
as many on each page, which often leads to putting part of the
word or phrase on one line and the rest of it on another line,
and in some cases even on another page.
 
The leading portion of the paragraph, sentence, or word, might
be called a "widow" since it has lost phrases or words that it
needs to be complete.  The trailing portions were often called
"orphans". . .especially when during the days of the first few
word processor it often happened that only one phrase, line or
word might be left to print on the following page.  This looks
particularly strange since professional editors have decided a
split of this nature is too ugly for professional publication.
In the future, the same concept can be applied easily, without
additional expense, and can therefore be applied to paragraph,
line, and phrase orphans, not only to page oriented orphans.
 
Here is a paragraph from the upcoming release of Dorian Gray,
one of our editors and I swapped our edits on several times:
 
 
In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel,
stood the full-length portrait of a young man of
extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it,
some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself,
Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused,
at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many
strange conjectures.
 
In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the
full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty,
and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself,
Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused,
at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many
strange conjectures.
 
In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length
portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it,
some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward,
whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public
excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.
 
In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the
full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty,
and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist
himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused,
at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange
conjectures.
 
In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the
full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty,
and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself,
Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time,
such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.
 
 
Take the following paragraph from the soon to be released Frankenstein:
 
[This from an actual Email conversation on this subject with one of our
volunteers who is working on editing Frankenstein]
 
***
 
How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and
snow!  Yet a second step is taken towards my enterprise.  I have
hired a vessel and am occupied in collecting my sailors; those
whom I have already engaged appear to be men on whom I can depend
and are certainly possessed of dauntless courage.
 
***
 
Here are some possible variations:
 
[I like the second one the best as good looking Etext, BUT. . .
I like the LAST one because it reads so poetically.  In this set
of examples it is no longer last, but it should stand out]
 
How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow!
Yet a second step is taken towards my enterprise.  I have hired a vessel
and am occupied in collecting my sailors; those whom I have already engaged
appear to be men on whom I can depend and are certainly possessed of
dauntless courage.
 
How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost
and snow!  Yet a second step is taken towards my enterprise.
I have hired a vessel and am occupied in collecting my sailors;
those whom I have already engaged appear to be men on whom I
can depend and are certainly possessed of dauntless courage.
 
How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am
by frost and snow!  Yet a second step is taken towards
my enterprise.  I have hired a vessel and am occupied
in collecting my sailors; those whom I have already
engaged appear to be men on whom I can depend and
are certainly possessed of dauntless courage.
 
How slowly the time passes here,
encompassed as I am by frost and snow!
Yet a second step is taken towards my enterprise.
I have hired a vessel and am occupied in collecting my sailors;
those whom I have already engaged appear to be men on whom
I can depend and are certainly possessed of dauntless courage.
 
[added later, the above was last before. . .I don't like the
trailing _I_ at the end of the next to last line.]
 
How slowly the time passes here,
encompassed as I am by frost and snow!
Yet a second step is taken towards my enterprise.
I have hired a vessel and am occupied in collecting my sailors;
those whom I have already engaged appear to be men on whom I
can depend and are certainly possessed of dauntless courage.
 
How slowly the time passes here,
encompassed as I am by frost and snow!
Yet a second step is taken towards my enterprise.
I have hired a vessel and am occupied in collecting my sailors;
those whom I have already engaged appear to be men on whom
I can depend and are certainly possessed of dauntless courage.
 
 
Here is the second version you sent me [at the bottom of your
note:
 
How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow!
Yet a second step is taken towards my enterprise.  I have hired a vessel
and am occupied in collecting my sailors; those whom I have already
engaged appear to be men on whom I can dependand are certainly possessed
of dauntless courage.
 
***
 
You will note there are MANY ways to try these!
 
I just like the phrases to line up. . .thus I wanted "already"
and "engaged" on the same line.