tepbc-ross-retyped/QUESTIONS.md

Readings to confirm with Sammay

\unsure{...} marks a doubtful reading (logged to unsure.log). \erratum{corrected}{as printed} corrects one of the original's own slips and lists it in the edition's Errata section. \qslip{as printed} marks a suspected slip inside quoted matter: it is never corrected, because the slip may belong to the quoted source rather than to Ross — it is logged to qslips.log and listed below so it can be checked against the original source.

Open

Nothing outstanding. The quotation-slip table below is for checking against the quoted sources when convenient — it does not block anything.

Suspected slips inside quotations — left exactly as printed, for checking against the source

Never corrected: the slip may belong to the quoted source rather than to Ross. Checking one means reading the cited page, so the table records how far the source can be got at. Five of them cannot be checked by anybody outside the archives that hold them — they are unpublished letters and trade documents, and for those the entry here is the permanent record, not a task. (Attempted remotely 2026-09-14 and abandoned: the full text of the early printed sources could not be reached reliably, and an unverified guess is worse than an open row.)

Published sources — checkable in a library

Orig. page	As printed	Quoted source
116	idolotrous	Carey, An Enquiry (1792), p. 2
116	proponderance	Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, p. 83
116	intially	Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, p. 83
130	continous	First Report \ldots\ Native Schools (1818), pp. 21-22
169	egregriously	Halhed, Grammar, p. xxiii
172	faithfull	Ouseley, Oriental Collections, I (1797), advertisement
208	tounge	Gilbert & Rivington, Lord's Prayer in Three Hundred Languages (1891), Preface
244	aquainted	Rāma Kamala Sena, A Dictionary in English and Bengalee (Serampore, 1834), I, Preface
246	professsional	Pandey, Indian Palaeography (Benares, 1952), p. 93
308	Newpaper	Vijayapaliah, Introduction of Kannada on the … Linotype (Bangalore, 1954), p. 3

Unpublished — in the archives Ross consulted, and nowhere else

Orig. page	As printed	Quoted source
276	Pharamaceutical	Majumdar to May, 14 Sept 1933, Mergenthaler Correspondence file no. 918
297	imposssible	MC 918: King to Griffith, 4 Nov 1937
305	seperate	LC 17A: Tracy to Martin, 3 Sept 1964
335	here (for there)	Letter from David Saunders, 16 Dec 1986
353	compatability	Stempel, Information; Photocomp Type Faces (January, 1980), Design Sizes

(The page numbers in qslips.log can be one out — the mark it reads is the edition page's last one — so this table is the authoritative record.)

Diacritic sweep, 2026-09-15 — 9 corrections, ~54 of 84 flagged occurrences checked

Prompted by Sammay spotting that Nastaʿlīq on orig. p.47 showed a quote, not a ʿayn. Two nets over the transcription: a rare-character inventory (U+02BF appeared exactly once in 431 pages — that singleton was the tell) and a check for names spelled with more than one accenting (84 occurrences). Every flag was read off the page image at 500–900 dpi; nothing was changed on the strength of the text layer.

Corrected (all verified against the image):

PDF page	was	is
p0049	Nastaʿlīq	Nasta`līq — the mark is a raised quote, as the typewriter had no ʿayn
p0072	Cálidás	Cálidās — second mark is a macron, not an acute
p0256	Rajākṛṣṇa	Rājākṛṣṇa — macron over both a's
p0260 ×2	Īsvaracandra	Īśvaracandra — acute on the s was missing
p0430	Iśvaracandra	Īśvaracandra — macron on the I was missing
p0430 ×2	Gītā	Gīta
p0430	Munṣī	Munśī — acute above the s, not a dot below
p0431	Rtusamhāra	Ṛtusaṃhāra — both dots were missing

Two findings that explain most of the rest. The typescript's French accents are handwritten — the cedillas under poinçons, the acutes on gravés, impériale, Napoléon, the grave on caractères are pen strokes, added inconsistently (one Poinçons on p.226 carries a hand cedilla, three others do not). Each instance is reproduced as it stands. And in the Bibliography the author gives a title in full transliteration beside its anglicised form — Ānanda Bājāra Patrikā (Ananda Bazar Patrika) — so most Bibliography variants are hers. Ṛtusaṃhāra was catchable only because it broke that pattern.

Still unchecked (~30): Giriśa ×5 (PDF 11, 16, 244, 250, 251), Bengālī ×4 (10, 86, 196, 425), Bāṅgalī/Bāṅgālī ×3 (8, 94), Raphala/laphala (324), Gouye (425), Sarma/Poincons (426), Rama (428), Bhagavat/Geeta (423), Pancanana (108), pratyūttara (117), the two Scheme-of-Transliteration rows (15). Each has a sibling occurrence already verified correct, and the last five batches (~24 occurrences) found no errors, so the remaining yield looks low — but it is not zero, and these are unchecked, not cleared. Vyākarana (255) is the authorial inconsistency the colophon already cites as deliberately kept; leave it.

Limitation worth keeping in view. Both nets depend on inconsistency. A name transcribed the same wrong way everywhere passes both silently — Bhăgavăt-Gēētā was only checked because its rare breves tripped the character inventory. So the flagged cases are clean; the diacritics as a whole are not proven.

Re-scan against the source, 2026-09-29

Every text page re-read by two independent OCR engines (tesseract at 300 dpi, with and without its dictionary, and the scan's own ABBYY layer), plus Apple Vision as a tie-breaker, compared word for word with src/pages; the OCR is a detector only — each difference was settled on the page image at 300–600 dpi. Five real mismatches, all fixed: three were silent normalisations of the author's slips (precusor p.79, inaugaration p.294, handwritten twelth p.58 — now \erratums, so the Errata section has 54 entries), and two were my punctuation slips (p.56 design: typed ;, p.230 Gottschall. typed ,). Everything else that differed was OCR error, a known erratum, or a handwritten correction (the unlogged ones are added above). Also confirmed: no line or word of the scan is missing from the transcription; all 949 footnote-mark positions read off the image; every plate caption present. Not covered: diacritics (no engine reads them), italics, and punctuation both engines drop.

Resolved

• p.295 compliments and p.348's dropped to join the Errata (Sammay, 2026-09-14). This overturns the p.84 precedent for these two: a word-choice slip and a dropped word are corrected and listed like a misspelling. p.84's own agreement slip is left bare — it was ruled on separately and the reading there is the author's grammar, not a slip of the typewriter.
• Errata boundary: slips inside quotations stay as printed and are listed above for verification against the source (Sammay, 2026-09-13). Ross's own slips continue to be corrected and listed in the Errata section.
• p.84 (PDF 86), note 149 — the agreement slip (“the characters \ldots\ shows greater skill”) stands as printed and unmarked (Sammay, 2026-09-14). An editorial [sic] was added on 2026-09-13 and has been removed: the edition sets it in the author's own notation (italic sic in upright brackets), so a reader could not have told the one editorial interpolation from her seven. Those seven — orig. pp. 47, 105, 106, 107, 169, 203, 307 (PDF 49, 107, 108, 109, 171, 205, 309), all inside quoted matter — were each checked against the page image and are the author's. The edition now interpolates nothing into the text.
• p.50 (PDF 52), note 67 — the handwritten square brackets round the typed parenthesis are ignored; the note is set exactly as typed (Sammay, 2026-09-13).
• Bengali: modern type is text, historical specimens are images (Sammay, 2026-09-13). Bengali that shows the modern script — the Scheme of Transliteration on p.13 — is set in Tiro Bangla. Bengali that shows a historical typeface is cut from the scan and set with \ig: that now includes the two CW1 sorts in the List of Plates (p.5, item 18) and in plate 18's caption (p.55), which were previously typed as Tiro text.
• p.5 item 18 / p.55 plate 18 — the two glyphs are জ and ত (Sammay, 2026-09-13); both are now set as cut images.
• Errata policy — the author's own slips are corrected and listed in the Errata section; PLAN.md's Editorial row records it. Thirteen entries: p.10 Navarnārī, p.20 Orientalisch und, p.25 distiguish, p.32 Gento, p.36 the unclosed parenthesis, p.39 n.d.),p. 2., p.49 Advertisments, p.113 twelth, p.115 Charaters, p.117 intitiate, p.123 possibilites, p.127 accomodates, p.132 newpaper.
• Inline type specimens are images — cut by tools/crop_inline.py, set with \ig at native size.
• p.10, item 113 — Navarnārī → Navanārī.
• p.5, item 5 / p.7, item 62 / p.12, item 173 — handwritten carets adopted (Dissertationes Selectae, Dharmaniyama, Granthanavibhāga).
• p.7, item 49 — “(Serampore, 1832)” italic in the original; kept as printed.
• p.136 (PDF 138), plate 52 caption — the imprint date is printed (Calcutta, 182 ), final digit missing in the original; left exactly as printed.
• Handwritten corrections adopted (rule 3 — silently, not errata): p.19 skillfully → skilfully; p.17 n.16 inserted “x” giving Reflexions; p.26 difficuties → difficulties; p.47 n.53 “a contemporary of”; p.58 n.94 marginal addition; p.65 homogenous → homogeneous; p.70 “from” inserted; p.104 activites → activities; p.105 “favour of”; p.108 struck e giving Mātiura (twice) and “complete” inserted; p.132 “Junior” inserted; p.211 “Figgins's” inserted before ‘Pica Bengalee’; p.217 cedilla giving poinçons; p.219 n.27 an “l” giving appellations; p.224 a struck letter giving preceding, a letter completing principal, and a cedilla giving Poinçons; p.226 cedillas giving Poinçons (three times) and accents on gravés and Hénaffe; p.232 “the” inserted before whole; p.233 an umlaut giving erbländischen; p.238 an “e” giving abgenommene; p.248 susceptible inserted; p.271 metal inserted and an “m” giving accommodated; p.283 and p.284 an “m” giving accommodate; p.286 an “r” giving occurred and “on” completing phenomenon; p.318 n.27 “and see above, p. 267” added; p.323 an “h” giving rhythm; p.331 from inserted; p.336 an “n” giving manufacturers; p.340 same inserted at the page head; p.347 and p.349 an “m”/“n” giving accommodate and implemented; p.352 an “m” and an “r” giving accommodate and repertoire; p.359 an “i” giving compatibility and a struck letter giving benefited; p.362 a struck letter giving benefited; p.366 an “n” giving fonts and an “i” giving facilities (n.13); p.389 an “s” giving newspaper and an “r” giving occurring. Added by the re-scan of 2026-09-29 (all checked at 600 dpi): p.19 “es” giving Dissertationes; p.110 a struck letter giving Qayyum; p.153 a struck letter giving Townsend and “ar” giving contemporaries; p.164 shortcoming written into a blank gap; p.170 and p.248 a struck letter giving benefited; p.171 the note “Principally in England.” (set as note 1); p.172 a transposition giving Persian; p.188 an “n” giving indigenous and an “m” giving accommodate; p.193 an “a” giving available; p.366 an “i” giving facilities in the text as well as in n.13; p.425 “es” giving Dissertationes.
• p.42 (PDF 44), n.39 — the mark before “acquired” is ink blotting, not a caret.
• Library ownership stamps are not reproduced (Sammay, 2026-09-14): they record that the physical copy belonged to a library, which is not true of this edition. That covers the University of London stamp below the notes on p.49 (PDF 51), the BIBL. LONDIN. UNIV. stamp under the last page of the Bibliography (p.429, PDF 431), and the accession stamp 20618054 on the scan's blank leaf 3. Graphic elements that belong to the document — the ProQuest logo on the provenance leaf — are kept. Corrected 2026-09-14: the mark on the title page, carried in src/pages/p0001.tex as plates/seal-p0001.png, is not the School's seal but a fourth BIBL. LONDIN. UNIV. stamp. It is dropped with the rest, and the claim in src/colophon.tex that a seal was kept is gone with it.
• Text face: XCharter since 2026-09-15 (Sammay), replacing TeX Gyre ScholaX, which read as too decorative; the metrics bear that out (x-height/cap 0.645 vs 0.717). Tiro Bangla needs no explicit Scale: MatchLowercase re-derives it from the main font, and the measured Bengali-to-Latin ratio held at 2.12 -> 2.08 across the switch. ScholaX was itself added to the Dockerfile on 2026-09-14. (This closes the old open question about a more readable face.)
• p.141 (PDF 143), plate 57 — the label is VF1 (a Vincent Figgins fount), settled by the author's own note 132 on p.143.