[Next Project] Sinbad: A Romance by C. Kay Scott

[Alexander Keane]

For my next project, I'd like to take a crack at another C. Kay Scott book after reading Blind Mice last year. Using the transcription and scans listed in the Patron Selection on wanted ebooks

Scans: https://archive.org/details/sinbadromance00scot

Transcription: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77919

Repo: https://github.com/squishy-mage/c-kay-scott_sinbad-a-romance

[Alex Cabal]

OK, David will manage with Lukas reviewing.

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[Alexander Keane]

On the title page of the scans with the copyright and publisher info, there's a quote. I believe that should go into an epigraph file right?

[David]

Correct. You've also got a dedication, I see, so that means also a half-title page. When it comes to building the spine, the tools will probably get these right, but you can check against SEMoS:
https://standardebooks.org/manual/1.9.0/single-page#3.1

[Alex Cabal]

Yes

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[Alexander Keane]

Yep, the dedication and halftitle I knew for sure, just wanted to double check the epigraph. What I can see so far, looks like I'll get a lot of practice with chapter/part level epigraphs too.

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[Alexander Keane]

The structure of this book has individual characters' sections marked off as "books" then individual stories within the books marked as "chapters" which are further divided into numbered sections within. The internal numbered sections appear to have been very small, though Project Gutenberg treated each one as a chapter/part with numbering like our 1-1-1 style. Should I maintain the "chapters" as individual chapters and files, or should I split at the internal headers some of which were less than three pages in the scans? I'm attaching the first page of Book 1, Chapter 1, Part 1 as an example of the division I mean.

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It's turtles all the way down!

[Alexander Keane]

Looking at the SEMoS and also at the way these seem to be working with each chapter getting an epigraph and having subchapters within, I'm currently proceeding Book, Chapter, Part, with the Book and Chapter getting the standard own page containing the division title plus the epigraph then each part acting as our standard chapters.

[David]

Hmmm..., I would have expected for this:

book-1.xhtml

chapter-1-1.xhtml -> with subchapters

...etc.

This is a pretty common pattern, e.g. in H.G. Wells's Tono-Bungay, or The History of Mr. Polly. You could check their repos for example structure. They lack epigraphs, but those are fairly simply (if sometimes tediously) inserted.

But the overriding principle is "recomposability", and as long as the pieces fit together correctly, there can be more than one viable solution.

On Thursday, 6 August 2026 at 03:14:24 UTC+1 Alexander Keane wrote:

Looking at the SEMoS and also at the way these seem to be working with each chapter getting an epigraph and having subchapters within, I'm currently proceeding Book, Chapter, Part, with the Book and Chapter getting the standard own page containing the division title plus the epigraph then each part acting as our standard chapters.

On Wed, Aug 5, 2026 at 9:56 PM Alexander Keane wrote:

The structure of this book has individual characters' sections marked off as "books" then individual stories within the books marked as "chapters" which are further divided into numbered sections within. The internal numbered sections appear to have been very small, though Project Gutenberg treated each one as a chapter/part with numbering like our 1-1-1 style. Should I maintain the "chapters" as individual chapters and files, or should I split at the internal headers some of which were less than three pages in the scans? I'm attaching the first page of Book 1, Chapter 1, Part 1 as an example of the division I mean.

. . .

[Alexander Keane]

I'll pull the subchapters into the main chapters, the way the html in the PG copy had worked, se-split had split out the subchapters and I figured it was easier to start fully split and then recombine later if needed than the other way round.

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[David]

Ah, okay. Of course "se-split had split out the subchapters" wherever you inserted a `<!--se:split-->` marker. :) Looking at the PG HTML source, I would have "split" at the h3 headers, but as long as it's working for you, that's fine!

(And it's just Tono-Bungay that has the *same* structure as Sinbad. Mr. Polly has sub-chapters, but not "books". Mea culpa!)

On Thursday, 6 August 2026 at 11:55:40 UTC+1 Alexander Keane wrote:

I'll pull the subchapters into the main chapters, the way the html in the PG copy had worked,  and I figured it was easier to start fully split and then recombine later if needed than the other way round.

[Alexander Keane]

Yeah, I foolishly thought <section> had made a good split which pulled all the subchapters, but that same split has actually made the combination easy since I just snag between the section tags to pull into the parent chapters

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[Alexander Keane]

As I do the cleaning, and check scans for the reason for some of the PG html, I'm noticing that the poetry throughout is italicized the same as the epigraphs. Should I add italic CSS to the standard poetry CSS, or should I leave the poetry roman?

[David Reimer]

Leave it roman.

[Alexander Keane]

Moving to manual semantics and thinking ahead to formatting at the proofread. Book 3 has an epigraph that appears to be a snippet from a play.

Should I break this into a table like normal drama formatting in SEMOS 7.6 or leave in paragraph form as it appears in the scans? Also worth noting is that this one epigraph breaks the normal epigraph formatting across the book by defaulting to roman type and using italics for emphasis and stage directions.

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[David]

Yes, you should format this as a drama snippet. Here's an example from an earlier production (see also the `local.css` for it). You'll need to follow SEMoS for the embedded stage directions, etc.