transcribing letters

I'm sure the librarians will respond but in essence it is as follows: Line breaks, yes retain fo ease of reading.  Word breaks at end of line, retain the word in whole without a break.  Other spacing, no.

So - if it looks like this:

January      8,      1 9 0 5

                       White Hou-

                                    se

                                                  DC.

You would transcribe as:

January 8, 1905

White House

DC.

I'm sure the librarians will respond but in essence it is as follows: Line breaks, yes retain fo ease of reading.  Word breaks at end of line, retain the word in whole without a break.  Other spacing, no.

So - if it looks like this:

January      8,      1 9 0 5

                       White Hou-

                                    se

                                                  DC.

You would transcribe as:

January 8, 1905

White House

DC.

Thanks.  And no indentations at the beginning of a paragraph?  

Correct! No need to retain (or add new) paragraph indentations.

Thank you!

Good to know, but I would have thought retaining the indentations of paragraphs would ease the reading and understanding of the letter . 

That is a good point!

The issue on our end comes up when we pull the transcriptions together into a single spreadsheet to move them to loc.gov. The indentations can screw up the formatting at that step and then they can display oddly back on the main website.

And plus: we'd much rather have folks focus time/energy capturing the text, rather than formatting

Thanks, Carlyn, that makes sense..