I purchased a copy (alas, somewhat damaged, and missing a dozen pages or so) of Andrew Comstock’s 1847 The Phonetic Speaker: Consisting of the Principles and Exercises in the Author’s System of Elocution, With Additions; the Whole in the New Alphabet.

I was thinking, before looking at it in person, that we might scan it and provide an electronic copy for public reference, via Distributed Proofreaders.

How? Comstock’s notation was incredibly influential among speakers and speech therapists in his day, but little-known now. I ain’t got the fonts. My OCR software complains that I should “Check the Language Settings!?” The Distributed Proofreaders (US) software is not Unicode-compliant.

So: Suggest a reasonable, searchable representation for a 400-page profusely illustrated work such as that shown in the image here. Explain how your choice of typography, layout, and metadata models might affect the usefulness and accessibility of the volume. Explain how you would represent the unique alphabet, which contains characters and diacriticals not found in standard Unicode texts.