title_case counted small words from the start of the whole string, so
every subtitle that opened with one was set in lower case: 'Aesthetic in
Kant: a Critique', 'Born Fighting: the Scots-Irish'. A colon starts a
title of its own and the first word of one is capitalised however small
it is.
Found by book-pipeline, which had been proposing a title page's capitals
verbatim into a catalogue and needed this to stop.
'(c) Alfredo Ferrarin 2004' was read as a title. The notice pattern
wanted the year to follow the symbol directly, and a copyright line puts
the holder's name in between, which is the ordinary way to set one.
The Python surface gained enough this week that three different builds
were installed on two machines all calling themselves 0.1.0: moria had
read_colophon through merge_colophon, mirkwood had a partial from the
middle of the afternoon, and PyPI had neither. A version that does not
move is a version nobody can depend on, which is how book-pipeline ended
up running a wheel scp'd into place by hand.
New since 0.1.0: colophon --shelf and catena.shelve, which file a book's
printed Library of Congress headings onto a closed list; catena
.read_colophon; catena.fetch_identifier, the registers in process; and
catena.colophon_prompt / merge_colophon, the question about what the
pages did not settle and the reply folded back in.
A catalogue's worst records are the ones whose file says nothing true about
itself: a PDF titled `Untitled` by an author called `Oxford`, which is a
publisher, from a filename that was never anything but a filename. What
those books do have is pages. The title page carries the title as the
publisher set it; the copyright page carries the imprint, the year, the
ISBN, and in most English books since the 1970s the cataloguing block, which
is a catalogue record a librarian already made, subject headings and all.
So this reads the pages. Every field names the page it came from, and a book
that printed nothing comes back empty with its fields in `unsettled` rather
than filled with something plausible — an extraction that starts at chapter
one has no front matter in it, and saying so is the answer.
Two pages look like a title page and are not, and both are how a catalogue
comes to name the wrong book. A series advertisement lists other titles in
the shape a title page uses, over as many as four pages with only the first
announcing itself. A translation's cataloguing block prints the original
title in brackets above the real one. Both are found and refused.
Three things the pages give that no file does: the subject headings a
librarian assigned, an ISBN that exists only in print — which turns a book
with no identifier into one `bibfetch` can look up — and a title in the case
the publisher meant, because a half title prints unbroken what the title
page breaks across two lines and sets in capitals.
`--prompt` and `--merge` are citefind's: a question about exactly the fields
the pages left unsettled, composed here and answered wherever the caller
keeps a model, with the advertising taken out of what the model is shown.
A field a model answered is marked `model`, so a record always says which of
it was read and which was inferred.
Measured against 600 books of the home corpus: the cataloguing block
answered for 21% of them and agreed with the catalogue 89% of the time, most
of the residue being the catalogue's error rather than this one's. Title
pages answered for another 41%. The remaining 38% print nothing readable,
and are what the prompt is for.
The harness compared these tools against the code they replaced — Python
imported from book-pipeline, podcast-pipeline and knowledge-mcp, and
JavaScript copied out of the podcast media server and indexer, each pinned to
a commit. All of it has since been deleted, so the live half cannot run and
the golden half pins answers against a source nobody can consult.
What was worth keeping was never the comparison. `KNOWN.md` argued, at
length, why a dozen of these tools deliberately do something a reader would
not expect: why pdfgutter measures the crop box throughout, why avplan finds
the encoder rather than reading one out of the environment, why mdscrub will
not manufacture a page boundary. Those arguments are about this code and
stand on their own, so they are now `docs/decisions.md`, rewritten to say
what each tool does and why rather than what it does differently.
Binding coverage is unaffected: the bindings carry 24 tests of their own, a
node smoke test against the built package, and a typecheck.
book-pipeline had its own copy of bibclean's author recovery. Bound on all
four surfaces so it can stop.
Checked against that Python over all 5,385 books in the library: 5,375
identical. On the other ten the Python had taken a translator, an illustrator
or the publisher off a copyright line — Sally-Ann Spencer for *The Dwarves*,
Thomas Nelson for a table of contents, C. S. Lewis for a book about Tolkien —
and bibclean either finds the real author in the Library of Congress block or
says nothing. Every one of the ten was read by hand.
Cuts a reference list into entries — at the note numbers where there are any,
at the layout where there are not — and reads each as far as its punctuation
allows. Fields that would not parse are named in `unsettled` rather than
guessed at, and `--prompt` asks a model about exactly those and no others.
Over 202 real reference sections from the corpus: 8,566 references, 95% with
a title, 82% with a year, 46% settling every field with no model involved.
A title is refused where the entry was never divided, so no record reports
its own text back as the work it cites.
`ibid.` is flagged and left alone — it points at a work, and the entry does
not say which. A rule of dashes is filled in, because the style defines it as
the author above.
chunkmd gains `note_starts` and `cites_something`: recognising a page of
notes and splitting one are the same knowledge, and two copies of that
pattern would drift.
funkpower