Better Church Fathers text (ANF and NPNF)

[jlm]

I am disappointed with the quality of the Church Fathers modules (CF-ANF, CF-NPN1, CF-NPN2). What bothers me most is that there are no page numbers (unlike BibleWorks), which makes copying a citation fairly useless. The other problem is what I consider a fairly high rate of errors: one typo per paragraph in some places. I've been sending corrections, but there are so many errors that it seems like it would be better to start over with a higher quality text.

 

Why don't you license the CCEL text? It is noticeably more accurate, has page numbers, and is formatted in ThML, which I think you've imported before.

 

Another nice improvement would be to put biblical references in the text instead of the footnotes. This would make the modules more useful with Research.

[plukevdh]

I'd like to second this. Can we please at least get accurate page numbers associated with these texts? All referencing works do so by page number and this resource is almost useless as a reference work without them.

[R. Mansfield]

I can't speak to whether we will add page numbers to this work--which we actually got from CCEL, probably before they had introduced page numbers themselves. However, I can say that we may have some more recent translations of many of the same texts in 2020.

By the way, most of these works are broken down to chapter and verse, which is more appropriate to use in citations than page numbers anyway--kind of like Bible quotations where it's more important to quote chapter and verse than page number.

[jlm]

Well, if you got it from CCEL, I would suggest rebuilding the module from their latest text. Not only does it have page numbers, it has far fewer OCR errors. Think of it as a way of saving time by not having to apply as many corrections to the existing module.

 

As for the usefulness of page numbers, yes, it's true that the first thing one cites is the name of the work and the place in it according to its traditional division according to books, chapters, etc. But to cite a translation, a volume and page number is necessary: look at the footnotes in ACCS for an example.