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Archiver > FreeBMD-Admins > 2000-12 > 0977139215


From: Ben Laurie <>
Subject: Re: Different sized capitals and multi-word surnames
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 11:33:35 +0000


Nick Tatham wrote:
>
> At the risk of opening a can of worms, I'd like to know what the official
> position is with capitalisation. I've looked in the FAQ and it doesn't seem
> to cover the point below (apologies if I missed it).
>
> The fiche I am transcribing has surnames all in capitals, except that the
> capitals aren't all the same size. Thus SMITH appears with a large S and
> smaller MITH but still all in capital letters.
>
> Do I transcribe this as SMITH or Smith?
>
> The reason I ask is that I have just got to the letter V and found surnames
> such as:
>
> VAN DEN END
>
> Again these are all in capitals. But the V and E are bigger ones. The D is
> not. This suggests the preferred capitalisation of that name is
>
> Van den End

That's correct.

> If we change the capitals to lower case like this, we are inventing new
> information. If we just transcribe as all upper case, we are losing
> information. I can't transcribe it the way I see it as the machine only has
> one size caps.
>
> What is the official position?

The official position is that we lose less information by converting to
mixed case than by capitalising, but neither is actually "wrong". So, we
prefer mixed case, but all caps is OK, too.

> And can this be added to the FAQ, perhaps specifically explaining what to do
> in this case?

That would be good.

Cheers,

Ben.

--
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruf

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