A Brief Note on Style

A Brief Note on Style

The original Bulletins were produced over a period of more than 12 years (March 1977 to November 1990). Each contributor has his or her own preference for spelling, transliteration and presentation. Some changes have been made to the original text.

The most significant change has been the adoption of North American spelling of individual words. In the course of transcribing the 42 volumes of The Bulletin, it was evident that individual authors, the editor and/or the typists used different spellings from time to time.

The transliteration of Arabic words and phrases has, likewise, been noted with the intention of being consistent. However, not all names have been changed since it is entirely possible that, for example, islands with a similar name actually do exist.

Obvious typing errors in the original text have been corrected. However, no other changes to the original text have been made; sentence fragments have been left in their original form and word order has not been changed.

As for the scientific (Latin) names for plants, birds, insects and marine life, the volunteers who have been transcribing the Bulletins were not able to verify the spelling as it appeared in the copies of the Bulletins used. In addition, it is entirely possible that errors have been made in the re-typing of the articles. Any inaccuracies should be reported.

Initially, the text of the original Bulletin articles was typed by volunteers using Microsoft Word and converted to web page format (html format) automatically; as a result, tab alignment is not always as precise as it appeared in the original document.

Later, when Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology was used to reproduce text, some errors may have been made. For example, the scanner often could not distinguish between an "m" and the combination "rn". The only available copies of the Bulletin were old photocopies so the scanning and OCR technology was, to say the least, challenged.

The original Bulletins were produced before modern photocopy equipment was available. As a result, the original Bulletin illustrations were black and white drawings, usually hand-drawn. In the final years of The Bulletin, some black-and-white photographs were reproduced. In preparing this version of the Bulletins for the internet, the illustrations were scanned and the resultant 'jpg' document inserted into the articles. The original scanning of graphics, however, was flawed because of bleeding of the background text into the image. As a result, all of the graphics are being re-scanned and the images enhanced. In some instances, new color illustrations have been added to complement the text.

For almost all of the pages in the ENHG website, the html format has been stripped of many of the features found on web pages. That is, there is no background colorm, no revolving graphic images, and no use of 'Flash'. In fact, on almost all pages, there is no prescribed font; the font you see is the default font set in the browser program you are using (Microsoft Explorer or Netscape Navigator). This is a deliberate strategy so that pages will load as quickly as possible.

Comments and criticisms are invited.