Old People and the Things that Pass/About this transcription

About this transcription
Text underlined with grey dots contains a footnote, like so. In some browsers the footnote will appear in a short-lived pop-up window if you hover your mouse pointer over the text. (In the example given in this paragraph the phrase "like so" should be underlined, and yield the the phrase "This is a footnote".)

This is a rough transcription from the scans found at the Internet Archive at http://www.archive.org/details/oldpeoplethingst00coupuoft.

I used the Internet Archive's TXT version as source, and processed the document as follows (SR = automatic search and replace):


 * Added a table of contents, and this back matter ("About the author and this work" and "About this transcription")
 * Added HTML for headings and paragraphs
 * Normalised a lot of punctuation (mostly removing spaces from ellipses and so on; SR)
 * Cleaned up ellipses (which were often recognised as for instance .,.;, instead of .....; SR)
 * Tried to fix misrecognised italicized text where I stumbled upon it, but I did not italicize the text in HTML
 * Reconnected words that were broken/hyphenated across two lines
 * Removed the page titles
 * Removed extraneous front and back matter
 * Added accents back to some names and words that had lost them during OCR, mostly SR
 * Tried to restore em-dashes (these got mostly lost in the OCR process, it seems)

Things I failed to do:


 * Fix scannos (text seems very clean though, except where the software had to recognise italicized text)
 * Separate paragraphs correctly (sometimes the OCR had stuck paragraphs together)

This book is in the public domain.

Branko Collin - Amsterdam - March 18, 2008.