COLOPHON
This edition of James Curle's A Roman Frontier Post and its People attempts to maintain as closely as possible the format of the original book. This means that the pagination of this web version matches exactly that of the original. By and large the original spellings and emphases (which—like the headings hierarchy—are not always consistently employed, it has to be said) have been retained.
This is a web site and not a book, and all the designer can do is suggest how the finished item will look. Thus a serif font is specified for the body text and a sans-serif one for the navigation menu at the side of the page, but preferred font families have been avoided. You will either not care what font your browser uses to render the pages (probably Times New Roman and Arial), or you will have set it up to use your favoured 'look' of (as an example) a Baskerville variant for the serif and Gill Sans for the sans-serif. If you do not know how to control the fonts in your browser, you may find it worth the time exploring the options or preferences section of your program. The original book, like so many other Edwardian publications, was set in a variant of the Caslon typeface, which (because tastes change) is seldom used by modern book designers. In the end, however, good typography is always typography you do not notice: what matters is that you should enjoy Curle's text.
The pages have been laid out using the W3C's preferred system of standards for cascading style sheets (CSS), which means that the final work should look similar in all browsing software and that the amount of HTML markup on the page can be kept to a minimum. However, because of the peculiarities of some browsers (particularly Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which is still not fully standards-compliant), one or two 'workarounds' have had to be employed.
An attempt has also been made to optimise the pages for printing (so that the navigation bar on the left-hand side does not appear and the text is centrally placed on the printed page), but results may differ between browsers. If you prefer a properly typeset printout, then you would be well advised to use instead the PDF files of the book which will shortly be available (and linked from this page when they are). Many of the line illustrations have printed (as opposed to drawn) scales (eg Figure 41 is 'Scale ½') and whilst it is impossible to render such information on a web page, it remains perfectly feasible in a PDF.
The site has been tested using the following browsers: MS Internet Explorer 5 and 6, Mozilla, Mozilla FireFox, Opera 7, and Lynx for MS Windows; Lynx, Links, Mozilla, Mozilla FireFox, Opera 7, and Konqueror for Linux (Konqueror using the same khtml renderer as Safari for the Mac). Whatever system you use, each page should degrade satisfactorily to a text-only browser such as Lynx and ought to be compatible with reading programs for the visually impaired.