Talk:Animals drawn from Nature and engraved in aqua-tinta

The book
Charles Catton's Animals Drawn from Nature and Engraved in Aqua-tinta was first published in 1788 in London and then again in 1825 in New Haven. The actual scanned copy is a 1788 edition held in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna where it is available online. A scan of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek copy of the book is also available as a (free) Google book online and as an ebook for Google Play.

There are English Wikipedia articles about both Catton and his book.

Handling of text and illustrations
The book comprises a title page, a table of contents listing plates with numbers and then thirty-six full page images of animals each followed by a page of text. The pages and the plates themselves are unnumbered. The page images from Österreichische Nationalbibliothek were uploaded as a zip file of jpg images to the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive no longer stores DjVu format (it is immediately deleted as being unreliable) but the OCR text generated by DjVu is retained and in this case was reliable. A pdf file was created from the jpg images using Microsoft Windows 10 print to pdf and the pdf and jpg files were uploaded to commons.

The OCR did not handle the Long s (sierra) character, "&#x17F;" (larger   Ls), which is very frequently used in the book – the letter is almost invariably read as "f" (foxtrot). This is a nuisance – though an amusing nuisance especially when Catton writes of a bear that "sucks with a tremulous noise". The OCR text was manually checked and the long s characters were changed to "ls" and never to "s". The distinction shows in page space but wikisource displays these as an ordinary "s" in main space. I was happy with this arrangement. Thincat (talk) 22:23, 21 March 2017 (UTC)