Berzelius 1819

Berzelius, Jöns Jakob (1819), Essai sur la théorie des proportions chimiques et sur l' influence chimique de l' électricité ​ECHO

Part of WO4. Sent with DESpecs version 1.1.2.

Sent: ok/date. Returned: ok/date/ ​raw text, ​unknown characters

1. First Analysis

Difficulties

• unproblematic

Special Instructions

• none

2. Questions From Formax

Q1 (email, 2008-12-15): Please see the attachment of 0215.jpg (488,050 bytes) of the book Berzelius_1819. Could you give us some advice on how to mark the two or three dots upon the characters which is in the red circle?

A (email, 2008-12-15): (Special instructions sent by accident. Another email: Please ignore the earlier email.)

Q2 (email, 2008-12-16): According to your email about "Data conversion work order IV: please IGNORE my earlier e-mail", did you mean that we should ignore the following answers?

Moreover, we have marked the number superscript as <^>2</^>, <^>3</^>, and so on. It is acceptable?

A (email, 2008-12-16): The Special Instructions for the table in Berzelius (1819) have now been confirmed. Please see below. (SIs re-sent unchanged.)

Final Instructions

(See also attachments below.)

Please use the following Special Instruction for the "Formules." column in this table:

Small letters always belong to the preceding capital letter, i.e. "Pb", "St", "As". 
Please mark the number of dots above an element like this: \1., \2., \3. and so on. 
For a single dot, you can also use \. instead of \1. 
In addition, use ^2, ^3, ^4 and so on for superscript.

Examples from p.0215 (only the text of the first two columns is typed):

<sc>ETAS</sc> plumbicus. # \2.Pb <ol>A</ol>^2
cum aquâ.. # \2.Pb <ol>A</ol>^2 + 6 Aq.
triplumbicus.. # \2.Pb^3 <ol>A</ol>^2
...
stannicus... # \4.St <ol>A</ol>^4
...
<sc>CIDUM</sc> aceticum. # H^6 C^4 O^3 = <ol>A</ol>
...
arsenicicum.. # As + 5 O = \5.As
# \5.As^2

Please note:
In the "stannicus" row, it is not "\2.S\2.t", but "\4.St" because the small "t" belongs to the capital "S".
In the "arsenicicum", it is not "A s", but "As", and it is not "50", but "5 O".

3. Analysis of the Result

Findings

The result looks like this:

<gap>ETAS plumbicus. # \2.Pb <ol>A</ol> # 2 # 4071.2 # 68.50 # 31.50
cum aquâ.. # \2.Pb <ol>A</ol> # 2 + 6 Aq. # 4750.8 # 58.71 # 26.99 # 14.30
triplumbicus.. # \2.Pb # 3 <ol>A</ol> # 2 # 9649.2 # 86.71 # 13.29
...
stannicus... # \2.S\2.t <ol>A</ol> # 4 # 4435.1 # 42.18 # 57.82
...
<gap>CIDUM aceticum. # H # 6 C # 4 O # 3 = <ol>A</ol> # 641.12 # C = 47.00 # O = 46.79 # H = 6.21
...
arsenicicum.. # As +5 O = \5.As # 1440.77 # 65.30 # 34.70
# \5.As # 2 # 2881.54

• <gap> makes sense
• <sc> is missing, but later on they do recognize small caps. It seems that they recognize it when there are in fact capital letters in different sizes (as in S<sc>ULPHIS</sc> on p.306), but not when the larger capital letter is missing.
• ^2 consistently becomes # 2, which makes no sense and is in fact counter-productive; # is the symbol for another column in the table. The special instructions introduced a new way of marking superscript. Was the rule too complicated? Not really. (Compare this with Greek text: There are initially many mistakes, and only after some time the error rate decreases. Does it mean that special instructions should be used only where they cannot be avoided?)
• They have ignored the rule that \2.S\2.t should become \4.St. One could argue that it doesn't make sense to make them think in chemical terms, and it can easily be corrected via some post-processing.
• They have typed the page number ( 3 ) simply as 3, and so on.

Recommendation

They should re-do the table, at least the ^2 part.

4. Post-Processing