The Guilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

[Bob R. Kenyon]

I’m just starting on this book, taking over from Vince who has already started working on it and offered me his repo.

Thanks,

Bob

[Alex Cabal]

OK, David will manage this with Emma reviewing.

On 3/27/25 8:45 PM, Bob R. Kenyon wrote:
> I’m just starting on this book, taking over from Vince who has already
> started working on it and offered me his repo.
>

> mark-twain_charles-dudley-warner_the-gilded-age.png
> bobrk/mark-twain_charles-dudley-warner_the-gilded-age
> <https://github.com/bobrk/mark-twain_charles-dudley-warner_the-gilded-age>
> github.com
> <https://github.com/bobrk/mark-twain_charles-dudley-warner_the-gilded-age>
>
> <https://github.com/bobrk/mark-twain_charles-dudley-warner_the-gilded-age>
>
> Thanks,
> Bob
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "Standard Ebooks" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
> an email to standardebook...@googlegroups.com
> <mailto:standardebook...@googlegroups.com>.
> To view this discussion visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/1A37A2D3-E20E-40F9-81F6-C9A0C31C4414%40bobrk.com <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/1A37A2D3-E20E-40F9-81F6-C9A0C31C4414%40bobrk.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.

[Bob R. Kenyon]

So I’m starting work on this book and there are a couple questions I have.

1. Vince started adding back in the epigraphs that lead each chapter, and got about halfway through. I would like to continue that, since I think they add a touch of whimsy to the book. Some are in non-unicode lanugages and will have to be rendered as SVGs probably.

2. There seem to be different scans of the book, some presenting it in two volumes, others in only one. There are differing chapter titles in each version as well. should I just use my best judgement in assembling this? Or are we interested in exaclty replicating a particular version of the book?

Here are two sample scans, the first is Vince’s source, from 1915, and in two volumes.

The second is from 1874, presented in one volume:

Thanks,

Bob

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to standardebook...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/ebb1f565-429e-4277-ab00-dd005351ab84%40standardebooks.org.

[Bob R. Kenyon]

I got my answer from Vince, so I’m good. I’ll use the later publication but in one volume.

Thanks,

Bob

On Apr 3, 2025, at 17:09, Bob R. Kenyon <b...@bobrk.com> wrote:

So I’m starting work on this book and there are a couple questions I have.

1. Vince started adding back in the epigraphs that lead each chapter, and got about halfway through. I would like to continue that, since I think they add a touch of whimsy to the book. Some are in non-unicode lanugages and will have to be rendered as SVGs probably.

2. There seem to be different scans of the book, some presenting it in two volumes, others in only one. There are differing chapter titles in each version as well. should I just use my best judgement in assembling this? Or are we interested in exaclty replicating a particular version of the book?

Here are two sample scans, the first is Vince’s source, from 1915, and in two volumes.

The second is from 1874, presented in one volume:

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/5CDD8CD7-5EAB-4E93-9D41-BFC9F519CBDC%40bobrk.com.

[Alex Cabal]

On 4/3/25 7:09 PM, Bob R. Kenyon wrote:
> So I’m starting work on this book and there are a couple questions I have.
>
> 1. Vince started adding back in the epigraphs that lead each chapter,
> and got about halfway through. I would like to continue that, since I
> think they add a touch of whimsy to the book. Some are in non-unicode
> lanugages and will have to be rendered as SVGs probably.

Are you *certain* they are languages that are not in Unicode? AFAIK
Unicode encodes *all* languages including ancient and obscure ones.

[Bob R Kenyon]

> On Apr 3, 2025, at 20:14, Alex Cabal <al...@standardebooks.org> wrote:

I am not certain, I will look into it.

Thanks,
Bob

[Vince]

It tries to encode all living languages, but not all languages, period. But at least some of these will have to be SVG’s whether they’re Unicode or not, because no reader font is going to support them. And for some, I suspect even if they are Unicode, it’s going to be difficult to find an existing font with support for them, even to make the SVG. But I didn’t get that far into it, so that last is supposition. (Some of these languages are really out there in terms of scripts.)

Bob, the Unicode roadmap page shows the languages they have and the proposals that have been accepted, submitted, etc.

[Robin Whittleton]

Noto is licensed under OFL and has pretty amazing coverage these days. E.g. I found out recently that they have Linear A and B support.

On 4 Apr 2025, at 07:10, Vince <vr_se...@letterboxes.org> wrote:



--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Standard Ebooks" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to standardebook...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/C1AB855B-555E-4FC2-B1E3-C00A64AF0E2F%40letterboxes.org.

[Bob R. Kenyon]

Thanks for that, Vince.

Bob

[David]

There is at least cuneiform (for this)! :) There are a few I don't recognize at all, but my hunch is that they probably exist in unicode.

There's an article that probes this to some extent, and remarks specifically on these epigraphs (pp. 222f.). Not sure it's any help practically, but it does suggest their role in the book: "Academic philological obscurantism is thus incongruously flaunted as American populism, as a story about contemporary American politics is couched in archaic and incomprehensible heiroglyphics." (p. 223) FWIW!

David / Fife, UK

[Weijia Cheng]

https://archive.org/details/gildedage0001mark_m7v6/page/n341/mode/2up

Chapter 5 seems to be Tamil script. The first character looks like பு (U+0BAA U+0BC1). I think the complete sequence is புத்தகங்கள். I am not super confident about my transcription (I know nothing about Tamil) but this appears to be a real word meaning "books."

I might go through and try to do more of these, this is actually kind of fun :)

[Weijia Cheng]

As David noted, chapter 6 is cuneiform.

I think chapter 10 is Arabic.

Chapter 18 is Cyrillic.

Chapter 23 looks like Devanagari.

Chapter 27 is supposed to be Chinese, I think. My ability to read Chinese borders on nonexistent, so please don't take me as any sort of authority, but the first two characters look mangled to me (I don't think those are real characters. The best I could come up with was 分不白皂.

Chapter 28 is Greek:

Ὁ κακρίνος ὧδ’ εϕα
Χαλᾲ τὸν ὄϕιν λαβών·
Εὐθὺν χρὴ τον ἐταῖρον, ἔμμεν,
Καὶ μὴ σκολιὰ ϕρονεῖν.

Chapter 29 might be Javanese?

I think chapter 33 is Syriac?

The final line is Hebrew.

Hope this helps. Might be a good starting point for figuring these out!

[Hendrik Kaiber]

Just to let you guys know that the author explicitly tells the language of these sentences and their translation in an appendix, in case you haven't noticed (he claims that chapter VI is Assyrian, for instance.)

-Hendrik

[Weijia Cheng]

Well, that definitely helps! Checking against the appendix, I think my transcriptions of the Tamil and Chinese are correct.

[David]

Thanks, Hendrik - I noticed, but only after Weijia's impressive bit of philogical detection! (And while "Assyrian" is the *language*, "cuneiform" is the *script*. :)

(Nicely done, Weijia!)

Here's the Hebrew string : טוב אחרית דבר מראשיתו although it would be nice to have this in a decent "book" font.

I could maybe help with the Syriac if need be, but the Peshitta of Ruth is difficult to access.

D.

[David]

Found it. Here's the Syriac:

ܘܢܗܘܐ ܡܒܝܐܢܐ ܠܢܦܫܟܝ̣. ܘܡܬܪܣܝܢܐ ܠܡܕܝܢܬܟܝ.
ܕܐܪܥܘܬ : ܕ : ܝܗ

(The quote, followed by the reference.) There's a nice "online" Peshitta here, as I discovered. :)

D.

[Bob R Kenyon]

Wow, thanks guys! 

The edition we’re working from has a separate author for the appendix material, I’m assuming I should add this name to the contributors?

Bob

On Apr 4, 2025, at 07:23, David <djre...@gmail.com> wrote:



--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Standard Ebooks" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to standardebook...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/060f61f2-fd1e-41f1-bafa-3cd74a67b93cn%40googlegroups.com.

[David]

If you mean the "appendix" with the languages/translations for the epigraphs, etc., at the moment it's not part of the ebook edition, so not attribution (only in `content.opf`, I would think) is needed.

Were you planning to add it in? If so, then (again), just include in `content.opf`, perhaps with a `wst` relator (or is there something else we use?).

D.

[Bob R. Kenyon]

Yes, just content.opf.

Thanks,

Bob

On Apr 4, 2025, at 08:04, David <djre...@gmail.com> wrote:

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Standard Ebooks" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to standardebook...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/c5efd501-bf33-42e4-adb6-7647998d05a8n%40googlegroups.com.

[Bob R. Kenyon]

The book leads off with a Chinese quote, translated in the Appendix. Should I use a unicode for this, or is this an SVG situation?

Thanks,

Bob

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Standard Ebooks" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to standardebook...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/4B68E265-D801-4840-81FE-648C0BF9A88C%40bobrk.com.

[David]

If it was me, I'd be SVGing it! I don't know if Weijia can help with this one. Probably Unicode would be the ideal, but whether that's attainable is the question.

D.

[Weijia Cheng]

I think it's

同協

心力

坭山

變成

金玉

[Weijia Cheng]

Something to note here is that it is supposed to be read top to bottom, then right to left. I don't know if that's something we have to encode into the book somehow.

[Bob R Kenyon]

My research (Google translate lol) indicated that the translation in the appendix was pretty correct. 

Thanks,

Bob

On Apr 4, 2025, at 09:56, 'Weijia Cheng' via Standard Ebooks <standar...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Something to note here is that it is supposed to be read top to bottom, then right to left. I don't know if that's something we have to encode into the book somehow.

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Standard Ebooks" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to standardebook...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/43f6ab88-60a8-4a0b-8ed3-c8a448422625n%40googlegroups.com.

[Anthony J. Bentley]

CSS writing-mode exists for this purpose.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/writing-mode

[Anthony J. Bentley]

To be more specific, the phrase would be written in HTML as 協力山成玉同心坭變金, and writing-mode: vertical-rl would be applied to it.

[Alex Cabal]

This is how we should do it. I don't know what ereader support would be like... Can someone test on a Kindle and Kobo?

If support is poor, this is conceivably something that we could convert to SVG during build, much like we convert mathML to SVG.

[Anthony J. Bentley]

SVG fallback could be done, but seems like overkill. A platform that doesn’t support writing-mode would simply display the text left-to-right which is just as comprehensible to a Chinese reader. Although it could be argued to lose the foreign aesthetic that printing the proverb in Chinese was intended to provide.

[Hendrik Kaiber]

I sent a simple file with some of the characters to my Kindle Paperwhite to test them. I didn't install any new fonts, so all were rendered using the fonts present in an standard kindle.

As I expected, cuneiform didn't render at all. Tamil and Syriac rendered well. Chinese (using writing-mode: vertical-rl ;) rendered the characters but not the vertical style, instead rendering as normal horizontal left-to-right. Syriac (and likely other Semitic scripts) do seem to need dir: ltr; to properly render, however.

--Hendrik

[Bob R. Kenyon]

Alex had emailed me a while ago about this book, which I hadn’t worked on for a while and he wanted to consider it abandoned and put it back on the wanted list. 

I would like to work on it again, if that’s ok. I don’t see any mentions of it being picked up on the list, nor do I see it on the wanted list, so if it’s ok, I’ld like to dig back in.

Thanks,

Bob

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Standard Ebooks" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to standardebook...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/67d18166-daf8-4c91-998f-0b24e12d5a17n%40googlegroups.com.

[Alex Cabal]

OK, if you want to continue working on it, I'll return the project to
'in progress' status. Please make sure to push some commits to your repo
from time to time to keep the project active.

>> writing-mode <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
>> docs/Web/CSS/writing-mode>

>> Screenshot 2025-04-03 at 22.35.10.png
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
>> Groups "Standard Ebooks" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
>> an email to standardebook...@googlegroups.com

>> <mailto:standardebook...@googlegroups.com>.

>> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/
>> standardebooks/67d18166-

>> daf8-4c91-998f-0b24e12d5a17n%40googlegroups.com <https://
>> groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/67d18166-
>> daf8-4c91-998f-0b24e12d5a17n%40googlegroups.com?
>> utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.

>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "Standard Ebooks" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
> an email to standardebook...@googlegroups.com

> <mailto:standardebook...@googlegroups.com>.

> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/

> standardebooks/FDAEB9D5-B8C7-4CE5-95B5-A9ABBDEF09EE%40bobrk.com
> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/FDAEB9D5-
> B8C7-4CE5-95B5-A9ABBDEF09EE%40bobrk.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.

[Bob R Kenyon]

Thanks, I will…

Bob
> On Aug 25, 2025, at 18:47, Alex Cabal <al...@standardebooks.org> wrote:
>
> OK, if you want to continue working on it, I'll return the project to 'in progress' status. Please make sure to push some commits to your repo from time to time to keep the project active.

> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to standardebook...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/21a582f0-626d-49c5-ad8b-e64c7d66af55%40standardebooks.org.
>