table of contents (TOC) issues

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harryr
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table of contents (TOC) issues

Post by harryr »

A table of contents (TOC) seems to be of two kinds:

— as scanned (reproducing a TOC as is from a book etc ) and

— digital: added on a computer to a PDF after scans have been assembled into it. (Not sure what this kind of TOC is exactly called to distinguish it from the other.) In other words, an extra finishing step in making the PDF can be to build its own TOC inside it.

In each case I have things I'm wondering about: pros and cons.

a) AS SCANNED (reproducing the TOC from a book etc)

Including this in an upload has the obvious advantage that whoever prints the whole PDF can match TOC entries to page numbers in the printout. However, is there a possibility of copyright issues? For example, where the editor has added a comment. One book has things like:
27. Tiento ( = Fantasia ) de vihuela I. 5. Anónimo
and
132. Canción XIII. Mort ma prive par sa cruélle (¿Crequillon? glosado por Palero).
In other words, the TOC can include opinions and conjectures in the form of comments.

Are there any criteria we need to consider in reproducing TOCs? (And if so, do title pages too ever have such considerations?) Maybe there is no problem if the TOC doesn't purport to be original work. Maybe all comments like those above are not claimed by the editor as property but just reproducing comon understandings among academics.

b) ADDED TO THE PDF AFTER THE FACT

I've been learning to use the TOC feature in PDFPen Pro and realised, this has two benefits:

— ease of use in viewing the PDF on a computer: The page numbers in a scanned TOC often don't correspond to those in the PDF. For example, if the book that was scanned has a few pages of info etc before the first music page, the editor may have chosen to make that page number one.

In any PDF, according to support staff at PDFPen Pro, the first page is always number 1. That's etched into stone. This is an issue if I want to find something inside the PDF without printing out the whole book. A workaround is to identify the PDF page number corresponding to Page 1 in the book and make a math adjustment when reading the scanned TOC. At best, though, that's tedious. In cases like mine, it can even waste time.

If a digital TOC is added to the PDF, each entry functions as a link. I click on a line in the PDF TOC and the display jumps to that page in the PDF. Particularly convenient if I quickly want to print just a particular piece or view it on screen.

— no copyright issues: Should there be any (as mooted above), the PDF's own TOC could presumably be built to work around them.

CONCLUSION

It looks to me like including both TOCs (scanned and digital) would be optimal. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
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Re: table of contents (TOC) issues

Post by Carolus »

How original are the comments? The two examples you cited are notes about….

1. An alternate title under which the item is known (presumably from another public domain source). Moreover, in most places "names, titles and short phrases" are not even subject to copyright.

2. A possible alternate composer attribution. Again, "names, titles and phrases" comes into play.
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