Help:Beginner's guide to typography

When proofreading a work for Wikisource, it helps to get the typesetting as close as possible to the original. However, Wikisource has some of its own style guidelines and the fact that this is a website rather than a printed book affects what can be achieved with typesetting. This page should help you start typesetting a work.

Please note that typesetting is secondary to the text itself. If there is a conflict between the two or a problem with typesetting, always keep the wording of the text intact and either ignore any inconvenient formatting or leave it until later. Wikisource is a wiki, so corrections and improvements can always be made at any time, either by yourself or by another user.

Paragraphs and sentences
Although the general maxim on Wikisource is to preserve the source text as closely as possible, there are some concessions made for the change of medium from the printed page to a digital format. Chief among these are changes to the way in which paragraphs are formatted, and the consequences of such changes.


 * Do not indent paragraphs or other text on Wikisource.
 * The beginning of a paragraph should not be indented, regardless of the original text. Why? In a printed work, the first line of a paragraph is normally indented by a small distance from the left margin. This indentation provides the reader with a visual cue to the start of a new paragraph.  On Wikisource, the visual cue is provided in the form of a greater spacing between paragraphs.  It is a natural consequence of our software that there will be greater line spacing between the final line of one paragraph and the start of the next paragraph.  Because this visual cue exists, we do not use paragraph indentation under normal circumstances.
 * Under no circumstances should one or more spaces be used at the beginning of a line of text. This has unfortunate consequences for the way in which the following line will be displayed by the software.  The text will appear in an equal-spaced font (usually Courier) inside a shaded rectangle, as shown below:
 * This is what happens when a space appears before a line of text.


 * Leave a blank line between paragraphs.
 * To produce the greater line spacing between paragraphs, simply leave a blank line between the two paragraphs when editing. This must be a truly blank line, without any characters or spaces.


 * Printed books break lines of text to fit lines to a page. Scanned texts often render line breaks at the end of each line according to how they appear in the original text. Such breaks are considered artefacts of the printing process. When transcribing a text from its source into a Wikisource page, it is best practice to remove these line breaks. Although web browsers will naturally wrap text for the individual reader, there are cases where leaving in line breaks proves problematic. It is recommended that line breaks be removed during the proofread stage of editing to lessen distraction during the validation stage.
 * Printed books break lines of text to fit lines to a page. Scanned texts often render line breaks at the end of each line according to how they appear in the original text. Such breaks are considered artefacts of the printing process. When transcribing a text from its source into a Wikisource page, it is best practice to remove these line breaks. Although web browsers will naturally wrap text for the individual reader, there are cases where leaving in line breaks proves problematic. It is recommended that line breaks be removed during the proofread stage of editing to lessen distraction during the validation stage.


 * Reconnect hyphenated words broken over separate lines.
 * Words broken over two lines should be reconnected into one word again. For example, if a line of text ends in "bad-" and the next line begins with "ger", the hyphen and break should be removed to leave just "badger". However, take care when doing this that you do not eliminate hyphens from the middle of hyphenated words, such as "twenty-nine", "three-fourths", or "Saxe-Coburg". When these words are broken at the end of a line, they may look like ordinary words that were hyphenated merely as a result of a line break, when in fact they are hyphenated words. Recognizing the difference between these two situations requires some common sense, but also an awareness that rules for spacing and hyphenation both vary by country and change over time. For example, the word "today" was sometimes written as "to day" or "to-day" in some older works. Browsing several pages of the work, or looking at nearby paragraphs, can often answer questions about whether a hyphen should be retained or collapsed.


 * A single space is sufficient between sentences.
 * Traditionally, style guides for printed works advocate two spaces following a full stop (period), exclamation point, question mark, or other punctuation occurring at the end of a sentence. People who learned to type or keyboard under such a style guide may do this habitually. However, web browsers normally collapse two or more consecutive spaces on a line into a single space. It is therefore necessary to include only a single space between sentences of the same paragraph, as any extra spaces will not be displayed.

The above statements about formatting are standard in most situations, but there are some exceptions. For example, poetry is deliberately written on multiple lines, and so removing all line breaks is not appropriate. Formatting poetry is a more advanced topic, and is covered at Help:Poetry. Also, when a hyphenated word falls at the end of a page, and continues onto the start of the following page, special formatting is required. This issue is discussed below under Multiple pages.

Text format
Under this heading are included issues of the style of text, such as bold and italics, as well as the size, font (such as ), and special characters.

Text style
You can type italic or bold text by adding apostrophes to either side of the text as shown in this table.

Text size
To change the size of text, you can use the following templates. This is especially useful with chapter titles or footnotes and it might even be used elsewhere in the text.

Other text effects
There are many different text effects that can be made with templates. This table shows some of the most common:

Font face
In most situations, Wikisource does not specify the choice of font for texts; this choice is left to the browser or reader. However there are some situations in which it is useful to specify a particular font, and this can be done with one of the following templates:

Symbols and special characters
Unicode, also known as "What about these funny characters?"

Often in our works there are unusual and foreign characters, and, not unexpectedly, many of us don't know how to type these. Edit tools are included in the new toolbar and at the bottom of our editing pages to assist you in adding these characters. Please note that the available character sets do not contain every character, especially for formatting very old typography. You can check one of the following sites to look to see if the character is available in modern fonts If you can find the character, you can just copy and paste it into the work on Wikisource. Alternatively, you can use the HTML entity code of the character; for example, the ‡ (double dagger) is represented with.
 * http://www.fileformat.info/
 * http://unicode-table.com/

Header and footer, and edit area orientation
The visibility of the header and footer is controlled by the [+] control on the toolbar. The default state, or how it should appear when opening a page for edit, is set in the user Preferences on the Edit tab.

The edit area orientation — between side-by-side or over-and-under editing mode — is set by the adjacent [↻] control on the toolbar. Its default state, or how it should appear when opening a page for edit, is also set in the user Preferences on the Edit tab.

Text position
These templates do not format text (such as adjusting text size); they help to format the pages themselves.

Multiple pages
The text in a book will normally continue across pages and the computer program behind the proofreading process assumes this. When the text appears in the mainspace, it will put a space between the last word on the first page and the first word on the second page. Usually this is what you want to happen. However there are some cases where you will need to use a template to make the program do something different.


 * If a page ends with the end of a paragraph: add the template nop on a new line at the end. This will prevent the paragraph being merged with the first paragraph of the next page.
 * If a page ends with a hyphen that is part of an actually hyphenated word, like "twenty-nine": add the page end hyphen template at the end of the last line. This will prevent the hyphen being subsumed when the two parts of the word are merged together.

Tables
Tables can be used both to create a table (if one was in the original text) and to arrange the layout of text. This can be complicated.


 * For more information, please see Help:Table.
 * Formatting tables can be made easier with the table style template.
 * See also w:Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Tables

More information

 * Style guide
 * Help:Templates: a guide to the most common Wikisource templates

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