From harald at lefant.net  Thu Jul 29 12:37:20 2010
From: harald at lefant.net (Harald Geyer)
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:37:20 +0200
Subject: [gutvol-p] converting from HTML to latex for printing
Message-ID: <E1OeYuu-0000op-8Z@a.g4.wien.funkfeuer.at>

Hi!

I'm looking into semi-automatically converting gutenberg.org ebooks
from HTML to latex for high quality printing.

I think by now I've read pretty much every howto on HTML on the
wiki page. Alas it seems that there isn't any recommended standard
on how to structure the manually crafted HTML files. After a
(very short) survey it seems that some people stick to proper
<H2> tags, while others do crazy stuff like <p CLASS=chapter>.

Obviously some manual work won't be avoidable, but I want to get
it as easy and automatic as possible. So I need to find or write
tools that:

warn me on any bad practices in the file
get the conversion mostly right in default cases
make it easy to fix problems manually without overlooking something

The idea is that it is ok to tweak the conversion manually but I don't
want to have to proof-read the whole book to see if the conversion
was satisfactory.

I guess I have to main questions:

1) Is anybody aware of any tool that might be helpful or can be
a starting point for future development? - So far I've looked at
pandoc, which at least produces valid latex (most other tools
failed that) and is generally great for transforming text formats.
However pandoc doesn't support any user interaction, like emitting
warnings about unknown tags, etc.

2) Which workflow would make most sense in a broader gutenberg.org
context? Should I first try to do some automatic conversion and
then try to fix the result manually - that's what I'm doing now.
Or should I first fix the HTML, resubmit it to gutenberg.org and
then have an automatic conversion to latex? That might be useful
for automatic conversion to other formats too.

Of course I plan to make the latex files publicly available.
How are the chances that they are accepted to be directly
available on gutenberg.org?

Harald


From Bowerbird at aol.com  Thu Jul 29 14:59:56 2010
From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:59:56 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [gutvol-p] Re: converting from HTML to latex for printing
Message-ID: <a0449.15713f2a.398353dc@aol.com>

harald, you have set for yourself a task that is impossible.

i tell you that so as to warn you.

and to give you a marker, so that if you _do_ attain your goal,
you will have an _extremely_ strong sense of accomplishment.

because you will _deserve_ it.

because your goal is impossible.

or close enough to impossible that it might as well be impossible.

***

someone "with authority" will probably come on here to tell you
that they aren't really interested in receiving your reworked .html,
or your latex files, for that matter, or even your high-quality .pdf.

scratch that.   they'll probably backchannel you to tell you all that,
because they don't particularly enjoy having to say it here in public.

but i'll let them tell you that.   because even if they did say "ok",
it's impossible for you to do what you want, so it doesn't matter.

i could explain why it's impossible -- because the idiosyncrasies of
the handmade .html files are too impossible for anyone to tame -- 
but you probably won't believe it until you have tried, and failed, so
i won't bother to elaborate.

so, even though i probably shouldn't do it, because it might serve
to encourage you, i'll be the first to wish you luck on your endeavor.

-bowerbird

p.s.   but i give very big kudos to you for having discovered pandoc...
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 1649 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.pglaf.org/pipermail/gutvol-p/attachments/20100729/4e6085e6/attachment.txt>