Talk:Animals drawn from Nature and engraved in aqua-tinta

The book

Charles Catton's Animals Drawn from Nature and Engraved in Aqua-tinta was first published in 1788 in London and then again in 1825 in New Haven.[1] The actual scanned copy is a 1788 edition held in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna[2] where it is available online.[3] A scan of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek copy of the book is also available as a (free) Google book online[4] and as an ebook for Google Play.[5]

There are English Wikipedia articles about both Catton and his book.

Handling of text and illustrations

The book comprises a title page, a table of contents listing plates with numbers and then thirty-six full page images of animals each followed by a page of text. The pages and the plates themselves are unnumbered. The page images from Österreichische Nationalbibliothek were uploaded as a zip file of jpg images to the Internet Archive.[6] The Internet Archive no longer stores DjVu format[7] (it is immediately deleted as being unreliable) but the OCR text generated by DjVu is retained and in this case was reliable.[8] A pdf file was created from the jpg images using Microsoft Windows 10 print to pdf and the pdf and jpg files were uploaded to commons.[9]

The OCR did not handle the Long s (sierra) character, "ſ" (larger ſ   {{Ls}}), which is very frequently used in the book – the letter is almost invariably read as "f" (foxtrot). This is a nuisance – though an amusing nuisance especially when Catton writes of a bear that "sucks with a tremulous noise". The OCR text was manually checked and the long s characters were changed to "{{ls}}" and never to "s". The distinction shows in page space but wikisource displays these as an ordinary "s" in main space. I was happy with this arrangement. Thincat (talk) 22:23, 21 March 2017 (UTC)