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by Rev. Samuel Rutherford

I'm reading the book with my pastor, and I'm finding it hard to follow. I also think Lex, Rex is an important work for the National Reform Association to circulate. So, I'm typing it by hand and trying to add structural markup to make it easier for other contemporary readers to follow it.

I'm working from the Sprinkle Publications edition of 1982 that Lloyd Sprinkle has so generously kept in print. The Sprinkle edition is a photo reproduction tracable to the edition printed for John Field in Octob. 7, 1644.

What am I keeping the same?

I am trying to preserve Rutherford's spelling and punctuation, except for his numbered lists. Any deviation that doesn't have a note beside it is probably a mistake, please tell me about it (mailto: link at the bottom of every page, mention which chapter and quote enough so I can find it). So I preserve many ... hath, but convert it it to it is and attach a note.

And I keep a number 2. with no corresponding 1., leaving it run in in the paragraph.

What am I systematically changing?

The book is crammed with numbered lists, most of them run in in the running structure of the text. I am trying to mark each one up as an html ordered list. It is not always clear where the last item of a list finishes and the text goes on outside the list. If you find places where I did that wrong, please tell me.

The Style Sheet language does not let me specify a numbering style of 1st., 2nd., 3rd., 4th., 5th., .... for a list. Neither does it look like it will provide (1.), (2.), (3.), ...., though there is at least one more thing to try. So the numbered lists will be displayed in ways the Style Sheet language lets me tell your browser to display them.

underlying technology

I'm using xhtml and css because they work on the web and because that is the only structural markup language I know.

non-English text

The text is full of latin, greek, and hebrew quotations. The standards provide for dealing with them correctly, the browsers have not, in general, caught up.

latin

I'm just marking it span class latin and specifying italics in the stylesheet. I don't think there is a language code for latin, yet. If I find out there is one, or get one assigned, I'll add lang attributes.

greek

The greek in the text is tiny and looks like it was drawn by hand for the original edition. Being ignorant of greek orthography, I may transcribe some of it wrong. I intend to reproduce exactly what I find in the text. Trying to do so, I looked up his reference in a Greek New Testament which did not help because he definitely inflected it differently than in either Greek edition I checked.

Nonetheless, using Unicode entities, I am transcribing Rutherford's greek as accurately as I can without fixing anything. If I have something to compare it with and end up believing there is something to say about it, I'll add a note. The first browser I found that displays it correctly is Netscape 6.

With some help, I've found combining diacritical marks, Combining Comma Above, = Greek psili, smooth breathing mark (entity 0x313) and Combining Greek Perispomeni, a tilde for overstriking Greek letters (entity 0x343). But I don't know what I'm doing with these marks. Oh, Scott told me those two curls close together are a kappa, not a chi, and there's even a second kappa in the font that might be formed that way.

hebrew

The Hebrew in the text is big and looks like it was set with movable type (each letter is always the same shape and the line is more regular).

The browser that displays the greek correctly also displays the hebrew letters, but backwards.

The bidirectional algorithm is part of Unicode 2 and of Unicode 3. It is included by reference in html 4.0. Eventually, browsers will conform to the specs. I'm trying to do markup that makes the text accessible to computer programs as well as to people looking at a screen. (We might, someday want to typeset from this edition, the indexing robots will be reading it as soon as I publish a link to it.)

Some years ago, I downloaded a free demo of a browser that was produced in the near east and offered as its primary advertising feature that it correctly renders Arabic text. I used it to look at English language web pages. Arabic is right-to-left, English is left-to-right. Probably that browser has been doing the bidirectional algorithm correctly for a couple years. If I remember correctly, it is called Tango.

It would be possible to lash things up so the first Netscape that displays the Hebrew characters also displayed them in the right order. Doing so would conflict with several other goals mentioned above. There are already browsers that do it right, there will be more browsers that do it right. I will enter the characters in logical order with html markup that specifies the display direction, keeping the markup correct according to the w3.org html verifier (see the Verify this page! link at the bottom of each page).

Rutherford put some points around the Hebrew letters, I'm not sure what I'm looking at, trying to reproduce it correctly using combining diacritical marks. The fonts don't seem to have all of them, and the browser doesn't seem to combine them yet. So the combining marks appear after (well, beside) the character they are supposed to be over or around. Most of his marks look like Hebrew point Dagesh or Mapiq, a dot that is supposed to fall within the base letter. Or they don't resemble anything in the available characters, so far as I can see. (Help! There's an e-mail link at the bottom of every page.)

Dashes and quotation marks

Html 4 has an entity for the em dash, —, and early browsers don't know about it. So, elsewhere on the NRA website, I convert the em dash to two hyphens. But Lex, Rex depends on so many features of html 4 that I'm keeping the dashes, here.

Html 4 has structural markup for quotations, <q>...</q>, that I am converting to various kinds of quotation marks, elsewhere on the site, but I'm keeping that, too, here, for the same reason.

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