Index talk:House-Intel-Glenn-Simpson-Transcript.pdf

Formatting convention questions

Just a couple of small questions regarding formatting in this work:

• Dashes within sentences. In the original, these appear to be "space,hyphen,hyphen,space" (the US federal government obvious doesn't bother with proper typography ;-). In the proofread pages, they are "space,en-dash,space" and sometimes "space,em-dash-space". Wikisource formatting is generally "em-dash" (no spaces). Which is preferred in this work? It doesn't matter to me which it is, but the source is at least consistent, so we should be too.

• Spaces after line beginnings like "MR SIMPSON:" and "Q". In the source these don't appear to be always simply a space. The ones that are "name,colon" are the same length as a space after a full-stop, so perhaps no special handling is needed, but after "Q/A" they are much longer. Should any attempt be made to handle that? Inductiveload—talk/contribs 23:37, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

• Good Q. Perhaps⁠ would be better? I could automate this replacement later today or tomorrow... -Pete (talk) 19:46, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

I am probably the problem here by using a space, em-dash, space; this is what I thought it was at first, but as this appears to be a poorly scanned version upon my further inspection you are correct and have a better eye, and indeed the one released from the U.S. Government is space, hyphen, hyphen, space, I guess we should keep it as such, and I will do my best to replace the em-dashes with a double hyphen as is in the original. Jasonanaggie (talk) 00:44, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

How long are the redactions? I've seen both {{redact|11}} and {{redact|12}}. -Einstein95 (talk) 03:26, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

I agree that consistency is best with dashes, and I'm also probably part of the problem. My inclination would be to replace " -- " with " – " (that's an en-dash). But I'm down for any variant.

The redactions are the names of the staffers, so they could be any length. It's difficult to tell. I think by using a variety of lengths we fairly accurately reflect that we have no basis for knowing who is who among the redacted speakers, so I don't see a problem with various different lengths that approximate the original text. -Pete (talk) 19:35, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, I just read the above discussion more closely...I have no objection to " -- " as the standard. -Pete (talk) 20:44, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

And, I just discovered another part of the problem, that I was inadvertently causing. I use a user script called "cleanup & lines" to remove extraneous line breaks. I just noticed, it turns double hyphens into em dashes. I will be more cautious with it going forward. -Pete (talk) 21:14, 21 January 2018 (UTC)