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Author: Sean Crist (Swarthmore College)
Email: kurisuto at unagi dot cis dot upenn dot edu
Date: 2004-10-29 10:04:26
Subject: Re: Alphanumeric references

> The alphanumeric references cited in BT appear to have a space between
> the number and the letter e.g. "Ex. 112 a,". Does anyone agree with this?

I noticed that issue too, and it made me hesitate. You could say there's a space character there, or you could say that there's no space character, and the gap is just an artifact of the way that letters kern after numeral characters. The OCR program sometimes puts in the space, and sometimes not.

It's visually ambiguous enough that I'm sure that not everybody will do this the same way, even if we make a guideline. So I already figured that I'd have to write a program to normalize this in one direction or the other when the hand corrections are done.

Myself, I had gone the other direction; I've been removing the space, on the grounds that this is how I usually see number letter combinations written elsewhere (apartment numbers, etc.). It might also make it slightly easier to parse the text (an "a" by itself could be either part of a page/line reference, or it could be the modern English definite article "a"; but if it's joined to a number, it's unambiguous). I'm not strongly committed to that answer, however.

I'd appreciate some other opinions here! What do the rest of you guys think?

--Sean

Messages in this threadNameCollege/UniversityDate
Alphanumeric references Jim 2004-10-28 09:11:27
Re: Alphanumeric references Sean Crist Swarthmore College 2004-10-29 10:04:26