Produced by John Walker.
Line #1. . .Text begins on Line #228
Production notes at line #16
Explanation of typographical conventions at line #34
This electronic edition of Edith A. How's _People of Africa_ was
produced by John Walker in January 2003. It follows the 1921 edition
(the only one of which I am aware) published in London by the Society
for Promoting Christian Knowledge and in New York by the Macmillan
Company. I have corrected two typographical errors in the original
text: "sandstorm" was misspelled as "standstorm" on page 21 (section 1
of chapter III), and "bought" appeared where "brought" was intended on
page 33 (paragraph 3 of section 2 of chapter IV).
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PEOPLE OF AFRICA
Etext Production Notes
This public domain Etext edition of Edith A. How's People of Africa
was prepared by:
John Walker
http://www.fourmilab.ch/
If you discover any errors in this Etext, please report them to me by
E-mail. If you're reporting a discrepancy between the Etext and a
modern edition, please include a complete citation of your source.
Upon close examination, most editions contain minor errors and
discrepancies which I've tried to correct in this Etext. These Etexts
are part of the intellectual heritage we share as humans--please help
to make them _perfectly embody_ the authors' legacies to the thousands
of generations and billions of readers whose lives they will enrich.
Beautifully Typeset Etexts
--------------------------
Free Plain Vanilla Etexts don't have to be austere and typographically
uninviting. Most literature (as opposed to scientific publications,
for example), is typographically simple and can be rendered
beautifully into type without encoding it into proprietary word
processor file formats or impenetrable markup languages.
This Etext is encoded in a form which permits it to be both read
directly (Plain Vanilla) and typeset in a form virtually
indistinguishable from printed editions of the work.
To create "typographically friendly" Etexts, I adhere to the following
rules:
1. Characters follow the 8-bit ISO 8859/1 Latin-1 character set.
ASCII is a proper subset of this character set, so any "Plain
ASCII" file meets ths criterion by definition. The extension
to ISO 8859/1 is required so that Etexts which include the
accented characters used by Western European languages may
continue to be "readable by both humans and computers".
2. No white space characters other than blanks and line
separators are used (in particular, tabs are expanded to
spaces).
3. The text bracket sequence:
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
appears both before and after the actual body of the Etext.
This allows including an arbitrary prologue and epilogue to
the body of the document.
4. Normal body text begins in column 1 and is set ragged right
with a line length of 70 characters. The choice of 70
characters is arbitrary and was made to avoid overly long and
therefore less readable lines in the Plain Vanilla text.
5. Paragraphs are separated by blank lines.
6. Centring, right, and left justification is indicated by
actually so-justifying the text within the 70 character line.
Left justified lines should start in column 2 to avoid
confusion with paragraph body text.
7. Block quotations are indented to start in column 5 and set
ragged right with a line length of 60 characters.
8. Preformatted tables begin with a line which starts in column 3
and contains at least one sequence of three or more spaces
between nonblanks. The table is formatted verbatim until the
next blank line.
9. Text set in italics is bracketed by underscore characters,
"_". These must match.
10. Footnotes are included in-line, bracketed by "[]". The
footnote appears at the point in the copy where the footnote
mark appears in the source text. Footnotes may not be nested
and may consist of only a single paragraph.
11. The title is defined as the sequence of lines which appear
between the first text bracket "<><><>..." and a centred line
consisting exclusively of more than two equal signs "====".
12. The author's name is the text which follows the line of equal
signs marking the end of the title and precedes the first
chapter mark. This may be multiple lines.
13. Chapters are delimited by a three line sequence of centred
lines:
<Chapter number>
--------------------
<Chapter name>
The line of minus signs must be centred and contain three or
more minus signs and no other characters apart from white
space. Chapter "numbers" need not be numeric--they can be any
text.
14. Dashes in the text are indicated in the normal typewritten
text convention of "--". No hyphenation of words at the end
of lines is done.
15. Ellipses are indicated by "..."; sentence-ending ellipses by
"....".
16. Greek letters and mathematical symbols are enclosed in the
brackets "\(" and "\)" and are expressed as their character or
symbol names in the LaTeX typesetting language. For example,
write the Greek word for "word" as:
\( \lambda \acute{o} \gamma o \varsigma \)
and the formula for the roots of a quadratic equation as:
\( x_{1,2} = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a} \)
I acknowledge that this provision is controversial. It is as
distasteful to me as I suspect it is to you. In its defence,
let me treat the Greek letter and math formula cases
separately. Using LaTeX encoding for Greek letters is purely
a stopgap until Unicode comes into common use on enough
computers so that we can use it for Etexts which contain
characters not in the ASCII or ISO 8859/1 sets (which are the
7- and 8-bit subsets of Unicode, respectively). If an author
uses a Greek word in the text, we have two ways to proceed in
attempting to meet the condition:
The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
does *not* contain characters other than those
intended by the author of the work, although....
The first approach is to transliterate into Roman characters
according to a standard table such as that given in _The
Chicago Manual of Style_. This preserves readability and
doesn't require funny encoding, but in a sense violates the
author's "original intent"--the author could have
transliterated the word in the first place but chose not to.
By transliterating we're reversing the author's decision. The
second approach, encoding in LaTeX or some other markup
language, preserves the distinction that the author wrote the
word in Greek and maintains readability since letters are
called out by their English language names, for the most part.
Of course LaTeX helps us only for Greek (and a few characters
from other languages). If you're faced with Cyrillic, Arabic,
Chinese, Japanese, or other languages written in non-Roman
letters, the only option (absent Unicode) is to transliterate.
I suggest that encoding mathematical formulas as LaTeX
achieves the goal of "readable by humans" on the strength of
LaTeX encoding being widely used in the physics and
mathematics communities when writing formulas in E-mail and
other ASCII media. Just as one is free to to transliterate
Greek in an Etext, one can use ASCII artwork formulas like:
---------
+ / 2
-b - \/ b - 4ac
x = ------------------
1,2 2a
This is probably a better choice for occasional formulas
simple enough to write out this way. But to produce Etexts of
historic scientific publications such as Einstein's "Zur
Elektrodynamik bewegter K”rper" (the special relativity paper
published in _Annalen der Physik_ in 1905), trying to render
dozens of complicated equations in ASCII is not only extremely
tedious but in all likelihood counter-productive; ambiguities
in trying to express complex equations would make it difficult
for a reader to determine precisely what Einstein wrote unless
conventions just as complicated (and harder to learn) as those
of LaTeX were adopted for ASCII expression of mathematics.
Finally, the choice of LaTeX encoding is made not only based
on its existing widespread use but because the underlying
software that defines it (TeX and LaTeX) are entirely in the
public domain, available in source code form, implemented on
most commonly-available computers, and frozen by their authors
so that, unlike many commercial products, the syntax is
unlikely to change in the future and obsolete current texts.