From Ritual to Romance

by
Jesse L. Weston

About the formatting

   |    E-text's table of contents    |    About the text    |    About the formatting    |   


Purpose of this webpage

To describe how the online text of From Ritual to Romance is rendered. Also to describe some of the differences between the online edition and printed texts.

Weston's synopses

Weston's table of contents page had her own synopsis of the contents of each of her chapters. At this website the synopsis for each of these chapters has been copied to the start of each webpage that contains a chapter of her book. This synopsis did not appear there in the orginal work.

Pre-formatted text

The online edition of From Ritual to Romance is derived from text submitted to Project Gutenberg. Gutenberg wanted only plain text, no HTML or other formatting. That left out some useful features such as hyperlinking and typography changes (e.g., having foreign text such as "e.g." shown in italics.) It takes a bit of work to add all the HTML markup and higher priority projects have been taking up the time to do this. So, for awhile, the text will be rendered in the hybrid mode of using HTML to say to render the text with the linefeeds where they appear in the source text (using the <pre> markup tag.) Typically web browsers will render such text in a fixed width font.

CSS - Cascading Style Sheets

This section explains why the text rendition may appear rather simple in older web browsers.

Rather simple HTML markup is used to render the online edition of From Ritual to Romance. For example, paragraphs are delimited with the tags <p> and </p>. To produce fancier rendering a feature of newer browsers called Cascading Style Sheets is used. This allows additional markup to be supplied indicating how the HTML element delimited by the markup tags should look. So instead of adding a number of blanks to the beginning of the first word of each paragraph to indent it the CSS markup can say instead that paragraphs are to be indented by some amount.

In the future a feature might be added to allow you to choose different rendering styles.

Superscripting

When marking one of Weston's citations or comments to the text a hyperlinked number in square brackets is added as a superscript. If your web browser can handle CSS then a little trick renders the square brackets invisible. If the HTML text is rendered as plain text though (say, through a cut and paste addition into a report) then the text should appear something like this:

"yet had the land been waste, but by his coming had folk and land alike been delivered."[3] Thus in the earliest preserved . . .
This will look a bit nicer than:
"yet had the land been waste, but by his coming had folk and land alike been delivered."3 Thus in the earliest preserved . . .
and it will make it easier to remove note numbers as you can search for one of the square brackets rather than numbers.

Italics

Italics are used in the original text for various purposes:

  1. Emphasis (e.g. "My opinion")
  2. Foreign words used in lieu of English (e.g. "Vide supra")
  3. Titles of literary works (e.g. "the prose Gawain)
No italics are displayed in the current online edition but this will be worked on so future editions will have them. When complete Weston's italized text will be tagged in this way:
  1. Emphasis - Tagged with a <em> "emphasis" tag (e.g. "My opinion")
  2. Foreign words used in lieu of English - Tagged with a <i> "italics" tag (e.g. "Vide supra")
  3. Titles of literary works - Tagged with a <cite> "citation" tag (e.g. "the prose Gawain)


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