[jats-list] Re: Page breaks in books

["Lizzi, Vincent vincent.lizzi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <jats-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Wendell,

Would a processing instruction do what you need, or do you need the page break
marker to be an element? Here is one method to identify page breaks in JATS,
which will probably work just as well in BITS. This is excerpted from our
internal documentation:


Processing instruction page-start identifies the location of page breaks.

<?page-start?>

<?page-start page-number="2"?>

The page number should be captured in a pseudo-attribute page-number, which
can be omitted if the page is unnumbered. The page-start processing
instruction can be placed at any location in the article XML that is allowed
by XML rules for well-formedness. A page-start processing instruction should
be inserted at the location of the page break between the first and second
page, and (if the page is numbered) contain a page-number attribute the value
of which is the page number of the second page. The start of every subsequent
page in the article should be identified in this manner.



Cheers,
Vincent



-----Original Message-----
From: Wendell Piez [mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2016 12:04 PM
To: jats-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Page breaks in books

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=mile
stone-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
XML | XSLT | electronic publishing
Eat Your Vegetables
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