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.