Indenting text in old newspaper

Transcription How-To
1

This seems so basic, but I can’t seem to find any information about it. Should I indent text where it appears? Currently transcribing a newspaper article in the James Garfield papers.

Thanks!

2

Welcome, new Discussion Forum friend. On long passages, I do a modest indent of 2 spaces or so. Just enough to help a future reader as they skim the page. I do not do a full skipped line between paragraphs-- which I have seen some do-- because, to me, that confuses paragraph-level shifts with section-level shifts. Maybe others have different philosophies, but I’ve done thousands of pages this way, … so… eek, if that’s not a good option, haha

3

Thanks for the advice. I feel I need to indent because that’s how it appears in the newspaper. Two seems like a good number, so I’ll try that. I agree that extra lines would seem excessive.

4

I generally don’t indent at all, as we have no current standards for that, and it seems subjective to me - I’ve seen people indent 2 spaces, 3, 5, and indeed as much as 20-30 trying to “center” text which makes the document kind of crazy-looking.

I do typically skip lines between paragraphs, as I think that adds legibility.

5

@felhanson thanks for posting! Indenting appears on our list of “Things to Avoid” https://crowd.loc.gov/get-started/transcription-things-to-avoid/. We treat indentation as a type of formatting, so please do not try to capture in your transcription.

1 Like
6

Thanks. Indents are so common, it’s interesting that it isn’t specifically addressed.

7

Thank you, Carlyn.

So what is recommended instead? Simply a line break?
Like this, and keep on typing?

Felicity

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Thanks, @felhanson - exactly! A simple line break works perfectly in the vast majority of cases.

9

Perfect - that’s easy enough. Thanks for the speedy response.

Felicity