Talk:Under the Sun/The Man-Eating Tree

I have three observations about "The Man-Eating Tree".

The first is that the text as presented does not reflect the standard format for typeset books--the first line of each paragraph is not indented; rather, the paragraphs are distinguished by the HTML default of extra leading between paragraphs. The HTML default is an historical relic of its early primitive nature. Now that we have the power to emulate printed matter, one would hope to do so.

The second is that it is conventional not to place spaces around em dashes. If you examine the scans I think you will observe that while the em dashes do not abut the neighbouring characters, the spacing is not that of a full space character. Justification might increase kerning.

These two observations apply to the whole corpus of WikiSource unless some individual has found a way to circumvent your outdated and incorrect formatting conventions. The first should be built into the template; the second should be listed as part of your style guide.

The third is a bit thornier issue. On page 297 is the phrase "of the sun, dew, and pitcher plants;". This is faithfully transcribed from the page, but the original is incorrect. The reference is clearly to the genus Drosera, commonly called sundew. A search on "sun dew" does not find it listed as two words until the third page on Hing; Google immediately asks "Did you mean: sundew" (question mark omitted) and then gives single-word matches; I found one hyphenated match. As it stands it is clearly wrong. The question is how to handle it and what version do you want to use if you change it. The conventional approach is to place "[sic]" after an editorial error when quoting a passage with an error; unfortunately, that only says there is an error and does not indicate the correct form.

I like what Deutsches Textarchiv does,as demonstrated at http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/view/eichendorff_taugenichts_1826?p=9. You will notice four red dots underneath the word "In" in the poem title of "In die Hoͤh'! 208". Hovering the cursor over the word pops up a message saying "typo: Iu" and an examination of the scanned text will confirm the error (iu is not a German word and I would bet my Langenscheidt's it is a rare combination in any context). To accord with modern practice, it should be one word; however, it may have been two words a century ago and removing the comma might be adequate.

Since I am an interloper, I don't know your conventions and will leave you to resolve it.

R.W. Crowl