At 09:42 AM 10/25/99 -0400, Tim Romano wrote:
>Jonathan Morse raised what could be a related topic a few days ago --
>representing and studying the typed page as Pound set it down. Should
>electronic editions of Pound be encoding his idiosyncratic typographic
>conventions?
 
I have a lot of experience with the various flavors and species of
electronic typography, and have mused from time to time over the problem
of how one might correctly present Cantos on-line.
 
I think it can be done, most straightforwardly using highly programmable
(and now regarded as rather ancient) batch formatting facilities such as
TeX and troff.  The state of the art in HTML won't quite get you there
in a portable way; which is to say that I think I could fake up a rendition
(using CSS positioning, for the cognoscenti) but it would only display
correctly on a subset (ideally not too small) of browser/platform/monitor
combinations.
 
But the big question is: what is known of Pound's intent?  Is there any
surviving information about EP's interactions with his publishers, by
which we might learn which aspects of presentation he thought important?
 
To me it seems that the key criterion for success being able to force
each line to begin with an indent relative to that of the previous line
which is the same as in the printed version.  The positioning of the
non-Latin glyphs and so on is an interesting but probably less severe
problem. -Tim