On 1/9/19 12:33 AM, David Starner via Unicode wrote:
Is there any way to preserve The Art of Computer Programming except as
a PDF or its TeX sources? Grabbing a different book near me, I don't
see any way to preserve them except as full-color paged reproductions.
Looking at one data format, it uses bold, italics, and inversion
(white on black), in sans-serif, serif and script fonts; certainly in
lines like "<b>Treasure</b> standard (+1 <i>starknife</i>)", offering
"Treasure standard (+1 <i>starknife</i>)" is completely insufficient.
Can some books be mostly handled with Unicode plain text and italics?
Sure. HTML can handle them quite nicely. I'd say even them will have
headers that are typographically distinguished and should optimally be
marked in a transcription.
The line I used to say about this is “there’s no such thing as plain
text on paper.” The concept of “plain text” vs markup or styling is
purely in the digital domain. On physical artifacts, it’s just ink on
wood-pulp, and the only “real” description of the page is a graphic image.
~mark
