[jats-list] Page breaks in books

["Wendell Piez wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <jats-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello JATS friends --

My question today is about marking page breaks, specifically in BITS.

As you know, one conventional approach to capturing information
regarding pagination in an original or reference version of a text is
to use empty elements as markers of page breaks, e.g. TEI <pb n="20"/>
to show where page 20 begins or began.

And this element will sometimes serve as a link target, i.e. <pb
n="20" id="p20"/> can appear, and then a "back of the book index"
which directs the reader to page 20 can point somewhere.

While this may be a terrible way to do indexing in an electronic
environment, we see this a lot, and sometimes better options are not
available. (Maybe the text was already published long ago, and our
choices are to use this index, or do without.)

BITS has 'milestone-start' and 'milestone-end' elements, but the Tag
Library suggests that if we are to use milestone-start to indicate
where a page begins, we should also use milestone-end to show where it
ends:

"When this element is used, it is assumed that the end of the textual
component is marked with a <milestone-end> element."

(http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/extensions/bits/tag-library/1.0/index.html?elem=milestone-start
)

So where TEI has <pb id="p20"/>, and HTML may have <a class="pb"
id="p20"/> ... we have a pair of elements:

<milestone-end content-type="page-end" rid="p19"/><milestone-start
content-type="page-start" id="p20"/>

because, perforce, page 19 ends where page 20 begins. Note in this
case (due to the semantics of page break markers) the milestone-end
element can never provide information we do not have already. (But it
can contradict or confuse things if something is ever off with the
pairing.)

Is this really what we should do or is there another option?

Put another way - am I correct to infer that the Tag Library directly
excludes use of milestone-start in the way the TEI or HTML uses
elements to indicate structures with only boundary markers? If so, am
I missing something else that would make life easier?

Thanks!
Wendell





-- 
Wendell Piez | http://www.wendellpiez.com
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