June 2005 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Volunteers in New Jersey area?
by N Wolcott 23 Jun '05

23 Jun '05

Are there any PG volunteers near Rutgers University in New Jersey. Need some one wo scan a few pages of microfilm to disc or email, there is no charge for this apparently. N Wolcott nwolcott2(a)post.harvard.edu

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Re: [gutvol-d] header detection revisited
by Lee Passey 22 Jun '05

22 Jun '05

>it's been one month since my post about "detecting headers", >in response to jon noring's "challenge" in that specific regard. > >in case you've forgotten, here's a quick recap: > > big and bold. that's what headers look like. > conspicuous. real hard to miss. easy to find. > >as i said last month, i have developed a 30-item checklist. >that's how many ways a header can make itself conspicuous. >but the main way -- by far -- is simply to be big and/or bold. > >so it's time now for part 2. > >but first, any questions? don't be shy, step right up, because >headers are the first step toward detecting all types of things. >(which is why we need to discuss them in some more detail.) > >-bowerbird > > The question is a bit ambiguous. What are you trying to detect headers _from_? AFAICT, Gutenberg e-texts don't have big and don't have bold, so neither can be the hallmark of a header in Gutentexts. Presumably, therefore, you are trying to detect headers in some marked-up text that uses some sort of presentational markup. Given your assumption that headers are 1. conspicuous, 2. hard to miss, and 3. easy to find (all variations on a theme), it seems to me that the best way to detect a header is to determine the general characteristics of the majority of all paragraphs in a document (size, indentation, amount of punctuation, location of punctuation, capitalization, etc.) and identify as headers any "paragraphs" which fall way outside the mean. I presume you have a reliable way to identify paragraphs (not always possible when using text derived from PDF files). Consider the shortest verse of the Bible: "Jesus wept." Biblical verses are merely numbered paragraphs. Can your algorithm determined that it is a paragraph and not a header? This is the problem of the false positive: it is as important to identify not-headers as it is to identify headers. You would be much more likely to increase your list of special cases if you would share the thirty-odd special cases you have already identified.

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re: [gutvol-d] header detection revisited
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Jun '05

21 Jun '05

as i step you through example after example after example -- all of 'em pre-existing, including many from the library itself, and handled with solid honest-to-goodness working source-code -- you'll come to realize fully how _easy_ it is to detect headers (and even header-level!), and the people who insist on telling you "it's impossible" will seem curiously illogical and out-of-touch... oh yeah, feel free to recommend any e-text from the whole library as a "test-case" that you would like me to consider in detail! :+) (to be fair, test-cases should include scans to resolve any doubts.) thank you! enjoy your first full day of summer! 90 degrees in l.a.! -bowerbird

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header detection revisited
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Jun '05

21 Jun '05

it's been one month since my post about "detecting headers", in response to jon noring's "challenge" in that specific regard. in case you've forgotten, here's a quick recap: big and bold. that's what headers look like. conspicuous. real hard to miss. easy to find. as i said last month, i have developed a 30-item checklist. that's how many ways a header can make itself conspicuous. but the main way -- by far -- is simply to be big and/or bold. so it's time now for part 2. but first, any questions? don't be shy, step right up, because headers are the first step toward detecting all types of things. (which is why we need to discuss them in some more detail.) -bowerbird

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Baha'i Faith texts - Terms of Use acceptable for us?
by Joshua Hutchinson 21 Jun '05

21 Jun '05

The Baha'i Faith makes available quite a bit of material in eBook form available on its website. Further, the Terms of Use (http://reference.bahai.org/en/terms.html) seem to make it perfectly acceptable to further distribute this work as long as the copyright and attribution is intact and it is for non-commercial use. Does anyone see a problem with "raiding" their material for inclusion in PG? I realize the texts will need to be reformatted to our standards and formats, but I can do that. Plus, as a side-benefit, they have many of the texts in Persian and Arabic as well as English, so we would be getting multiple languages represented in one swoop. Josh PS FYI, I am a Baha'i, but I don't speak in any official capacity. I'm going by the Terms of Use linked above.

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Re: [gutvol-d] Derivative works, or, what is copyrightable?
by shimmin＠uiuc.edu 20 Jun '05

20 Jun '05

As another poster pointed out, in the U.S., Bridgeman v. Corel says that some mechanical reproductions are not "original works" for the purpose of copyrightability; indeed, the point of creating these works is to be unoriginal. Whether PGLAF wants to stand on Bridgeman in this particular case is their own decision; as always, the only sure test as to whether something is clearable is to try and clear it. That said, if it's not the illustrations you're interested in, but merely need to consult another edition to repair lacunae in the text you're dealing with, then just consult whatever editions you have easily at hand, and repair the text accordingly.

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Re: Print-on-demand and dead-tree copies of Gutenberg texts.
by grendelkhan 17 Jun '05

17 Jun '05

Thanks to everyone for their comments so far! I'm learning quite a bit as I go. As of October 2003, the US Commerce department reported that about three-fifths of households had a computer; a little over half had internet access. https://www.esa.doc.gov/Reports/NationOnlineBroadband04.htm So it's not as bad as I was led to believe. Still, Perhaps I should have stated my goals a little more clearly. I have no particular interest in making money or making a business out of this. I'd simply like to make the books available---through whatever means that may be---in dead-tree form. I suppose it's a terrible idea fo tie the actual Project to a commercial entity by developing a working relationship with them---I don't think an "Official Project Gutenberg Edition" is a good idea. lulu.com, as mentioned, has no setup fees, but their pricing is a mite stiff---$4.53 plus $0.02/page. Certainly better than buying stuff from most university presses, but not exactly bargain-basement. Lightning Source charges (based on some quick googling at http://com1.runboard.com/bthescribesmessageboard.fwritingarchives.t45%7Coff… ), $0.90 plus $0.013 per page, but I don't know what kind of binding that requires, or what sort of setup fees they charge. Perhaps they'd waive them if DP put out some sort of print-ready version in addition to human-readable text. I'm thinking TeX->PDF here, as it's pretty much the stablest human-readable-yet-fully-marked-up format available. Thoughts? I suppose I should take a relatively short etext, mark it up and see how it looks. I concur that simply throwing plain text, or even decent HTML, at paper is a horrible idea. So, what I ask is---is there a way to prepare the etexts as, in addition to HTML, whatever format is print-ready for these machines? Since typesetting a ready copy is a simple matter of feeding it to a Xerox DocuTech or whatever the $100,000 piece of hardware the print shop uses is, how can we do the necessary preprocessing ourselves? What exactly does the "setup fee" include? Thanks to everyone again for being so helpful with this. --grendelkhan

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re: [gutvol-d] roundtripping formatted text through a .pdf
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 Jun '05

17 Jun '05

jon gorman said: > I think bowerbird just claimed the pdf that he exported > was easy to import back as pdf (via copying out the text), > not necessarily that he converted an existing pdf file. > Of course, I'm probably wrong about that. > Without capitols I sometimes get lost ;) i understand... :+) and what you've said is pretty-much correct. yes, i'm _only_ talking about .pdfs that _my_ viewer-app creates. (if some other program created the .pdf, then blame that program.) so, you put plain-text into my viewer, and it formats it nicely. you can print that nice formatting to a .pdf (which looks nice). and then you can copy the text out of the .pdf. when you do that, much of the nice formatting has been stripped away, of course, and we're back to plain-text again. (if i remember correctly, .pdf _does_ retain italicizing, but it _doesn't_ retain bolding. i don't have the faintest idea why, it's kinda weird like that. and it definitely stores the color of the text, which is cute. but it definitely strips the _size_ of the text, which is bad. all of this is in _my_ version of acrobat reader, which is v4. we talk about acrobat/.pdf like it's one straightforward thing, but it's a crazy mish-mash of different-and-changing versions, so all of our discussion needs to be couched in careful clauses.) but the loss of formatting doesn't matter, because after you have made a few global changes (which, among other things, restore the blank lines between paragraphs that get stripped), you can put the text back into my viewer-program, and it will redo the nice formatting, just like it did it in the first place... with zen markup, this is all pretty easy to accomplish... :+) > If I had time, I'd write one by hand for ya > that had none of the encoding mess. i'd love to see that! -bowerbird

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roundtripping formatted text through a .pdf
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 Jun '05

17 Jun '05

recently i've worked on "roundtripping" styled z.m.l. text through a .pdf. my viewer-program can write z.m.l. text to a .pdf such that copying the text out of the .pdf gives a user the same text that went in. make a few global changes -- which restores the whitespace acrobat usually strips from text -- and you can load the text back into my z.m.l. viewer-program and generate the same .pdf once again... the proof is in the pudding, and the structure is in the presentation. that is _not_ something you can do with text that's copied out of a .pdf created with other programs i know. generally, the .pdf format is known as the "roach motel" of file-formats -- content goes in and can't get out... :+) -bowerbird

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Print-on-demand and dead-tree copies of Gutenberg texts.
by grendelkhan 17 Jun '05

17 Jun '05

I was having a discussion with my father, and I thought I would bring it up on the mailing list, as it seems to be the place for it. We'd just come out of our local Wal-Mart, and I'd noticed the out-of-copyright books (classics and such) being sold for $6 to $11 each. I commented that folks could just download the books for free if they wanted to read them, but he asked how many people owned a computer, and how many of those had heard of Project Gutenberg? So I did a bit of researching, and discovered that there exist "print on demand" publishers, which instead of doing the offset-printing runs of thousands and thousands of books, will, once a book has been prepared and typeset, sometimes keep none at all in stock, and print them only when ordered. It seems that it would be a good idea to come up with some way to offer the majority of PG's catalog through some method of print-on-demand publishing, selling at-cost. Many Gutenberg works are obscure, and not of general enough interest to warrant a print run from a traditional publisher. I'm aware that I could clearly run off and do this myself, but (a) I wanted to get some feedback from the community at large, and (b) print-on-demand publishing still requires start-up costs, and a per-book "setup" fee of some kind, above and beyond the per-copy materials cost. Given that PG has the Distributed Proofreaders to provide lots and lots of work on worthy projects, and given that PGLAF is a charitable organization which lots of people love, is there some way to get around that issue? Would it be worth it to provide a source of dead-tree editions of many of the archive's works? Thoughts? Objections? Pointers to some guy who's been doing this for the last ten years that I failed to Google up? --grendelkhan

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