[sword-devel] KJV 1611

[jhphx]

Printers at that time did a number of things that would be surprising to 
us today. Also, things like spellings were not as officially fixed as 
they are now. That means that being "faithful to the text", and/or 
translators, is not as clear of an objective, with texts that old, as it 
is with some modern texts. The same word could have multiple spellings 
in the same text and none of them be errors. Printers would change or 
choose a spelling to add or subtract characters from a line to keep 
columns uniform. "The" could become "ye" using y for thorn to save space.

So, one could be faithful to a copy of the text. Which in my opinion, 
would be part of giving people the 1611 experience. Or, one could try to 
be faithful to some text that may only exist in theory. (Uniform 
spellings and such.) Or, something in between.

Anyone doing this should probably define what it is they want to 
reproduce, a copy, a text represented by the copy/s, or something else. 
And should probably select a copy to be their authoritative source and 
perhaps some alternatives sources for solving problems. (The 
authoritative source could be a facsimile and if so it should be clear 
that the copy the fax was made from was not used as the authority.) They 
should define how they are going to address problems, and features, and 
understand they may have to change their minds as they go. If they make 
correction they should log the nature of the corrections with the 
understanding that latter they may want to undo the changes or at least 
defend them.

I am not an expert on any of this. It is just my two cents.

Jerry

On 12/14/2013 11:17 AM, Ron Parker wrote:
>
> On the original page I have of the Passover in Exodus there are also
> `ct' and double-long-S ligatures.  Which leads to a question I've
> mulled over about doing this.  How many of the typographic features
> such as these should be preserved?  For example the `e', `y', `~',
> etc. that appear written above other letters as what I believe are
> typographers abbreviations.
>
> Personally I've always wanted to create a version that retained all of
> this for the historic and artistic aspects.  Even going so far as
> considering eventually creating a font with the same metrics as was
> used.  I fully realize that it was manually set and so the interword
> and sometimes interletter spacing would probably not be exactly
> programmitically reproducible.  Also this is further complicated by the
> insertion on especially tight lines of some Roman type within the
> predominantly Fraktur-ish text.  I also seem to recall the occasional
> shifting of point sizes.
>