User talk:Iain Bell

DNB

I see you are venturing into DNB territory, which is nice. I suppose you know where to find the project if there's anything you need. I thought I'd mention that we don't use endash for the title dates (always hyphen, we're agreed); in the text endash is fine. Charles Matthews (talk) 20:25, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Missing text - it shouldn't be so often the case that typing up is the only way to replace text that is not available opposite the djvu (for whatever reason). The whole text for vol. 55 is available at http://www.archive.org/stream/dictionaryofnati55stepuoft/dictionaryofnati55stepuoft_djvu.txt. It depends on the volume where you should look, but the information is gathered at Wikisource:WikiProject DNB/Progress, in sufficient detail for most purposes. Charles Matthews (talk) 11:57, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

quotes marks, apostrophes

Feel free to open a discussion on these, but the current practice is to use " ' for “ ’”. If you need some links to recent discussion, I can dig those up if you want, but there is more interesting things to focus on; I noticed you are working on some journals from the Folk-Lore Society, there is sure to be some treasure in those. cygnis insignis 04:33, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

And spaces around em dashes too. We have a style that removes them, and it happens that was used in this work. Are you able to remove these without too much trouble? Would you mind indicating where this was suggested? cygnis insignis 04:53, 23 September 2010 (UTC) Resolved for the time being, use it if you wish. See {{—}} 07:09, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

I have read the Wikipedia arguments in favour of " and ' over “ ” and ‘ ’, and as a Mac user, most of them don’t hold water. While I am agreeable to using " ' in page titles, here in Wikisource, in text itself I feel ‘ “ ” ’ are de rigueur. After all have you ever seen a professionally-produced printed book use computer quotes?

As for the emdashes; sorry. I had an identical situation where another editor added the changed — to {{—}}, so I followed suit. As for change to {{—}}, it just broke the articles that I have done that did have an hair-space bracketing the emdashes. Oh, and the documentation no longer matches the template (Apologies for late reply, been AFK for a few days). — Iain Bell (talk) 17:01, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Apologies not necessary, we are all innocent bystanders in matters like these. I agree they look better on a mac, rubbish elsewhere, the absence doesn't bother me on screens when I'm reading. I think the space/no space of modern, unjustified text is less noisy and ambiguous; it is possibly a benefit to reading large amounts of it. It is less fussy looking, and much less effort, to produce content in this way. A vanilla version can honour prefs like curly quotes and so on, however, we should have one way to do it for the reasons you point out. It adds labour to proofreading, so the reasons need to be very good to change the style - if we do this we should conserve all the aspects of finer print design. Thanks for the reply, excuse my blather on principles of type-transcript. 17:29, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

• My change was reverted by the way, you can use it as you were. My firm advice is to avoid going down that path, many try and give up when they realise how tedious it is. cygnis insignis 17:34, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Cp. ’ and '. Pls undo your addition of these, ta. cygnis insignis 19:48, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, I don’t get the significance of four pages that I haven’t edited that use ‹ ' › versus one that I have edited and changed to use ‹ ’ ›. With less than a third of Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders proofread, and no progress being made, I feel my changes are not disruptive. I am going to validate the proofread pages first, then proofread the remainder (it’s easier to track my progress that way). I’m not going to leave a mixture of quotes in a work—I won’t change one unless I’m prepared to change them all. Iain Bell (talk) 10:17, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks!

Hi Iain, I just thought I'd say thanks for proofing some of Miscellaneous Papers on Mechanical Subjects. — Sam Wilson ( Talk • Contribs ) … 10:02, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

You’re welcome. However, I have noticed that there is a problem with the .djvu file: pages 68 and 69 are duplicated, while pages 72 and 73 are missing. These two are at the beginning of the “Rifled fire-arms” article. — Iain Bell (talk) 10:23, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Rivers and canals

Iain, nice to see you adding to the Priestley index. In general your formatting is better than mine - but I thought I'd press ahead as I had the text ready and you may be able to adjust the formatting more easily.

Incidently I'm planning to do a modified "match and split" for the main text - but there'll be plenty of proofreading to do shortly! Chris55 (talk) 15:39, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

I'll let you get on with it then. Regards — Iain Bell (talk) 14:02, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Indentation and poetry

Wondering if you are aware of the {{gap}} option for indentation of lines of poetry, as opposed to using emsp, etc. It may be less tedious for you—depending on the poem. Londonjackbooks (talk) 15:39, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I am aware of {{gap}} – I’ve used it in Anglo-Saxon poetry before I found {{cesura}}. The problem with {{gap}}, is if someone does a cut-and-paste, all they will get is a single standard space. By using  , the indentation should be preserved (hopefully…). — Iain Bell (talk) 15:52, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

You are right about cut-and-paste results. Neither option fares well in pdf conversion... So many output options... Never a perfect science! Londonjackbooks (talk) 16:18, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

(Over?)use of Bold in Lengths & Levels (Bradshaw's Maps)

Hello.

I noticed you recently removed bolding from some Fraktur text (e.g. Page:Lengths and Levels To Bradshaw's Maps.djvu/5.) Don't worry, I quite agree, it was too much!

In fact, would you mind having a look at some of the other pages I've done and let me know you opinion regarding use of 3px rules in some (well most really) of the tables. I did think it was a bit over the top but was being lazy because {{ts}} already has code for 1px and 3px borders. Before I get too far into it, do you think I should change them to (say) 2px rules instead?

Regards, MODCHK (talk) 07:13, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

In most of the tables, the rule under a total length for a segment of canal is heavier (2–3 px?). On some, the rule above the total looks less heavy than the under rule, but heavier (1–2px?) than the vertical column separators (1px?). But on other pages the latter two look the same.

In essence, its your choice. I have noticed two discrepancies however: The whole numbers should be padded-off from the right — I’m not sure whether or not a figure space {{fsp}} will do the trick; and the figures should be at the bottom on the table cell, rather than the default vertical-align:center.

Other than that, well done, and keep up the good work. I had a go at bits of it, but gave up as it needed too much formatting for my taste. Luckily, I’m not the original uploader.

Regards, — Iain Bell (talk) 12:30, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for the suggestions. I shall do what I can; but at least so far I think I have got away without having to uses 2px rules. A quick test reveals {{fsp}} (which I confess I have never encountered before!) simply does not cut it. It is narrower than any of the UNICODE fractions ½, ⅝ etc., although I believe so far that all the usual imperial combinations are in fact the same width. Is suspect the lesser-used ones like ⅑ are yet wider again, so I'll have to put some more thought into this before proceeding.

I had already noticed the vertical-alignment issue, but had been carefully hiding the fact from myself, hoping it was not too noticeable. Guess I failed that one too!

I shall overhaul everything just as soon as I get another block of time & enthusiasm. Cheers, MODCHK (talk) 17:18, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Byron's Works TsOC

Thought to thank you for building the TsOC for Byron's Works. I don't like building TsOC, and it made things easier. I probably wouldn't be where I'm at now in the text otherwise. Londonjackbooks (talk) 17:26, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

My pleasure. Regards — Iain Bell (talk) 12:27, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

Wikisource User Group

Wikisource, the free digital library is moving towards better implementation of book management, proofreading and uploading. All language communities are very important in Wikisource. We would like to propose a Wikisource User Group, which would be a loose, volunteer organization to facilitate outreach and foster technical development, join if you feel like helping out. This would also give a better way to share and improve the tools used in the local Wikisources. You are invited to join the mailing list 'wikisource-l' (English), the IRC channel #wikisource, the facebook page or the Wikisource twitter. As a part of the Google Summer of Code 2013, there are four projects related to Wikisource. To get the best results out of these projects, we would like your comments about them. The projects are listed at Wikisource across projects. You can find the midpoint report for developmental work done during the IEG on Wikisource here.

Global message delivery, 23:21, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

spacing

Iain Bell, in your present work, sometimes one space exists before next sentence and other times it is 2 spaces. Is this done on purpose? Kind regards, —Maury (talk) 09:11, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

It is because I haven’t been consistent in removing the second space. Double spacing after a full stop is a holdover from the typewriter/data-processing era. Once transcuded, the wiki software supresses the second space anyway, so it doesn’t really matter, IMO. Regards, — Iain Bell (talk) 09:26, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Precious Stones

Thanks for picking up the missing pages so early in the piece. I've found an alternate copy on HathiTrust that can have the two pages taken out and inserted in our copy. In the meantime, I've swapped the templates to link to the planned second work for the month. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 10:12, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

By a strane coincidence, I have just completed the ToC for that work… — Iain Bell (talk) 10:19, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

lang template

I've come across more than one instance where you have used {{lang}} to enclose German or Latin. Is there something to be gained by such use of which I am unaware? The template's stated purpose here (and on sister projects) is to aid in the display of languages that use non-Latin fonts (e.g. Greek, Chinese, Hebrew, Tamil). As such, I can see no benefit for the template's use with most text from western European languages. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:41, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

PotM

Please refer to the associated Talk page for style guidelines for this month's PotM. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:36, 1 January 2016 (UTC)