Actually it was Syriac and the compositor was John Bowley...
John
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gareth Hughes" <garzoh...@gmail.com>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex@tug.org>
Sent: 23 October 2010 17:41
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] (Xe)LaTeX output in a non-(Xe)LaTeX scholarly community
On the matter of declining skills in typesetting I'm reminded of an
Oxford apocryphon of a printer who was preparing a Sanskrit grammar. The
printer contacted the author, an esteemed professor, with a crucial
error in the Sanskrit text. The professor first felt angry at being
questioned on matters of Sanskrit by a printer, but verified the
reported the error in his own copy. Returning to the printer he asked
how he'd managed to spot the error. The printer replied that, after
setting pages and pages in a script he could not read, he had learnt
that one of them never follows one of them! Ah... attention to detail;
they don't make them like that anymore!
Gareth.
John Was wrote:
Well I'm still in the Press once a week at least (for choir practice!)
so I shall make sure these comments reach the right ears. They
correspond, unfortunately to my own impression. Leofranc
Holford-Strevens works heroically on critical editions but he is the
sole in-house editor left and can't possibly handle them all. I think
he is pretty well full-time on large projects with extensive commentary
(and still finds time to publish and lecture extensively on an
astonishing range of topics).
Getting back to TeX-related matters, the hyphenation patterns available
in XeTeX (even to 'plain' users like myself) are an enormous help, even
if I disagree with the English at frequent points (the Latin rarely lets
me down, aside from a few rogues - is hucusque one? - which I guess are
analagous to Knuth's 'manuscript' in refusing to comply with the
algorithms). No one bothers to read people like Priscian on what should
be done with Greek and Latin, and no one at OUP involved in passing
proofs would have the faintest idea about this subject. Neither, alas,
do authors - with the Dictionary of Medieval Latin (which I have just
relinquished with completion of Fascicule XIII in the middle of letter
'R') it was left entirely to me, and I fear that laxity in this matter
will pervade future fascicules as it did in some of those that preceded
my involvement. When I asked the compilers to keep a look-out for any
bad hyphenations that I might have missed in perusing and correcting the
proofs, they asked me to explain the rules!
John
----- Original Message ----- From: <jherr...@allegheny.edu>
To: <xetex@tug.org>
Sent: 23 October 2010 15:05
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] (Xe)LaTeX output in a non-(Xe)LaTeX scholarly
community
Yes, as you would guess, the copy-editor marked up my files by hand
and sent me the hard copy.
Recent OUP critical editions in Greek prose could use a lot more
copy-editing; I would assert that their production standards in this
area have fallen drastically in the last decade. We have new editions
of the Greek orators Demosthenes and Lysias in the Oxford Classical
Text series, all filled with rampant flaws in hyphenation and line
numbering in the apparatus. Reviews have also identified numerous
slips of a more substantial nature, that seem to suggest very little
copy-editing is happening on these in house. It seems that OUP has
adopted new modes of production for these critical editions that
create these problems, and authors (and copy-editors?) don't regularly
take the time to fix it all. I know in the case of my book the
copy-editor, who was otherwise very attentive, didn't seem to have
looked at the Greek at all.
The other major series of critical texts in Greek (and Latin), on the
other hand, the Bibliotheca Teubneriana, has been shuffled from one
publisher to another in the last decade. It's now in the hands of De
Gruyter, who seems devoted to its revitalization. They're requiring
all editors to submit camera-ready-copy, and recommending that they
use Critical Edition Typesetter (<http://www.karas.ch/cet/>). I have
the impression they only really care about the appearance of the CRC,
though, and wouldn't really care if authors prefer other typesetting
systems.
Jud Herrman
On 2010-10-23, John Was
<john....@ntlworld.com> wrote:
OUP will normally be amenable if saving money is in prospect! I
think the
barrier here has always been the copy-editing process (now more
vulnerable
since house style is not seen as so important and indeed there is no
longer
any copy-editing department at OUP). A critical edition will normally
require a rather small amount of copy-editing, though there is still
the
introduction and commentary to consider - but if a TeX-savvy author is
willing to implement those copy-editing changes and suggestions s/he
agrees
with, there is no real difficulty. The copy-editor would then
presumably
work by pen(cil) on a draft PDF printout in the traditional way (or by
annotating the PDF electronically, which can be tedious).
Or of course one can simply trust the author not to make any mistakes
at
all, and forgo copy-editing. Even twenty years ago this was
mentioned as a
possibility at OUP but no one dared to do it in my time there.
But I hope this doesn't become too much of a trend or I'll have to
look for
something else to do! In the meantime, I must dust down my old brown
OCT of
Hyperides...
John
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