Theos-Talk Archives (July 1994 Message tl00051)

Books have to have been copyrighted 1918 or earlier to be in the
public domain--there's an automatic extension of their copyrights
to 75 years. That is, unless, they were put in the public domain.

Unpublished manuscripts, even older than that, are still protected
for many years to come. The copyright law is complex.

The Mahatma Letters, for instance, although it appeared later
than 1918, is in the public domain, because they were published
and the Mahatmas themselves did not challenge the violation of
their copyright of their letters within a certain number of years.

----

Regarding "omnipage", I have the program, and have used it to
setup a number of books. It is still, though, only useful for
initial raw input...

Taking "Esoteric Budhism", which I recently setup, the time
involved was:

     6 hours - initial scan in Omnipage
     6 hours - check recognition in Omnipage
     4 hours - initial compare of formatting, italics, and
              insertion of simple styles in WP
    15 hours - read book and compare to initial computer
              printout for corrections
    10 hours - formatting cleanup and enter initial corrections
    15 hours - check spellings against modern standards and
              correct as needed
     5 hours - enter corrections and next printout
    10 hours - make table of terms used, including capitalization
             and hypenation standards for theosopical terms

Note that I wasn't carefully keeping track of the time, and
these are estimates made in retrospect.

And there is still more work to do...