About the Electronic Version of J.A.L. Waddell's "De Pontibus."

PLEASE NOTE: The present explanation is a "work in progress" temporarily on the Web in this form for testing purposes. Please address comments to: Jeff Dodd at this address:

This electronic version of J.A.L. Waddell's "De Pontibus" was produced from an example of the "First Edition. Second 1000" printing. This printing contains corrections and additions not found in the "first 1000" and should be considered a different edition for bibliograpic purposes, with a publication date of 1900.

The original text was scanned with an HP Scanjet 3500c and recognized with OmniPage Pro 12. No attempt was made at this stage to correct the text. Rather, it was saved in rough form as a text (.txt) file. Further manipulations took place in Microsoft Word, but the corrected text was copied into Microsoft Notepad before final html formatting. Corrections to the text were made manually, referring to the original in all cases of doubt.

Equations were set using Microsoft Equation 3.0 and saved as Web files. The gif files produced in this process were extracted, renamed, and saved.

Embedded illustrations were scanned into Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, and processed to improve clarity and reduce noise. When necessary, the processing included retracing of lines. No attempt was made at an exact match of retraced line thickness to that used in the original, though reasonable faithfulness was achieved in this regard. The illustrations were saved as GIF files optimized for Web display.

Full-page tables and plates were scanned into Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 and processed for the Web. I regret that the image quality is not good, though the material is readable. It proved impracticable to reset the tables as ascii text and the original employed fractions set in very small type. Not even processing at the pixel level could improve clarity beyond a bare minimum of acceptibility. The graphs were equally difficult to process, and the noise introduced was significant. If better equipment becomes available, I will redo these illustrations.

The text files, with links to files for embedded illustrations and equations, were manually formatted as separate html files for each page. No attempt was made to produce a facsimile edition, but attempts were made to be reasonably faithful to the original formatting, to the extent that this was feasible with html.

While every reasonable attempt was made to ensure accuracy of transcription, doubtless there are errors. The editor will gladly correct any such that users may report.