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

a couple of questions about alice
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 20 Sep '05

20 Sep '05

i have a couple of questions about alice in wonderland as it exists in the project gutenberg library... 1. am i missing something, or is there no file of any type in the library at the current time that is of high quality? 2. am i missing something, or is there no .html version that includes illustrations, whether by tenniel or anyone? 3. am i missing something, or is there no .txt version where the text-styling has been restored from all-caps? 4. does anyone know of a scan-set of the paper-book? i would love to see what the original pages looked like, and even include this as a sample text in banana-cream. 5. does anyone else think a flagship e-text like this one deserves better treatment than it is getting right now? i dug out the z.m.l. version i did a while back, and will soon upload variants of it for our little experiment here... -bowerbird

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Followup on rendering images in non-HTML XML documents; Handling TEI <note>
by Jon Noring 20 Sep '05

20 Sep '05

As I noted in a message this afternoon, it is possible to use CSS to embed and render images within non-HTML XML documents, such as TEI documents. The following example demonstrates one method, and works in Opera and Firefox: http://www.windspun.com/demoxml/embedimage.xml (The general method will work in IE6 provided IE6 recognizes the CSS selector -- but in this example IE6 doesn't understand selectors of form 'element[attr="attrvalue'"]' The technique is based on the Fahrner Image Replacement method (FIR): http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/replace_text/ The above link describes a couple other methods, but I haven't tested them out yet. Unfortunately, it appears there's no way in CSS 2.1, and probably not in CSS 3, to read the image file name in the document (as part of an attribute value), and use that to embed the image in CSS. (I.e., we'd like to be able to do url(attr()), but the CSS 2.1 spec does not support that, and CSS 3 probably won't either.) Thus, the CSS style sheet has to carry the specific image file names in it, which is not good (the image references could be put into a separate style sheet, and the demo CSS style sheet suggests how to do that.) I've appended the XML and CSS documents of this demo at the end of this message. There is another simpler technique using the CSS 'content' replacement property. But I could only get it to work in Opera, so I won't detail it here. On a distantly related topic, I previously discussed how one might use CSS to properly display the TEI inline <note> tag. It needs to be extracted from and displayed outside of the main flow of the document. It appears CSS3 is planning some cool stuff that may already work in Opera and Firefox (but haven't checked it out to see if indeed these browsers support the new properties.) See, for example: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-content/#moving Enjoy! Jon (XML document: embedimage.xml) ********************************************************************** <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <?xml-stylesheet href="embedimage.css" type="text/css"?> <embedimagetest> <picture image="pic1"> <text>This is the descriptor to image #1.</text> </picture> <picture image="pic2"> <text>This is the descriptor to image #2.</text> </picture> </embedimagetest> ********************************************************************** (CSS style sheet: embedimage.css) ********************************************************************** embedimagetest {display: block; padding-top: 100px;} picture {display: block; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center; height: 350px;} picture[image="pic1"] {background-image: url("image1.jpg");} picture[image="pic2"] {background-image: url("image2.jpg");} text {display: none;} **********************************************************************

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re: [gutvol-d] re: off to the races
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 19 Sep '05

19 Sep '05

marcello said: > "We" did it *before* all. I did it in 2003. i wasn't talking to you, marcello. your versions still have pimples... > You should have created a catalog of all features > found in the originals, not of the few features that > could be preserved in the plain text format. it's a test-suite of features common in _books_. i've been desktop publishing since ventura v1.0... > But then you would have duplicated the work > of the TEI Consortium and found out > how inadequate your ZML format is in real life. coming up with a vastly simpler formulation is _not_ "duplicating the work", not at all... and as my test-suite clearly demonstrates, z.m.l. is *more* than adequate "in real life". and that's the whole point... > Looks like you are trying to jump on > the TEI bandwagon after years of bad-mouthing it ... i'm not on the .tei "bandwagon" at all. but i _am_ glad that somebody is finally starting to make it real enough that we can finally subject it to some basic comparisons, so we can see that what it is going to give us in benefits isn't _nearly_ worth what it's gonna take from us in costs. i can make good on all your promises with _zero_ markup. so who are you ever gonna hoodwink into doing your markup? you best course of action right now is to close your mouth and sit back and watch while i run circles around your .tei... -bowerbird

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re: off to the races
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 19 Sep '05

19 Sep '05

lee said: > As threatened, I have started preparing > a CSS file that will allow TEI files, at least PG-TEI files, > to be displayed natively in a web browser.... interesting work, lee... > To test the CSS file, I grabbed Mr. Perathoner's > version of _Alice in Wonderland_ from > http://www.gutenberg.org/tei/marcello/0.3/examples/alice/ oh, so we _are_ doing alice after all. great! i'll dig out my z.m.l. copy, for a comparison... :+) i'll also continue the work i was sharing on jon noring's "my antonia" scan-set example, as the new openreader guy (nee thoutreader) has created an example using that content, if you'd like to go head-to-head on that too. and i helped a new friend put together his book for project gutenberg, so we'll have that to use as an example as well, if you wanna mark it up. plus, if you'd want to explore the gamut, lee, rather than just dabble with the simple stuff, i once created a test-suite containing all the features that are found across the p.g. library. you could be the first to mark that up in x.m.l. looks like we're finally getting real, folks... let us once again give thanks to all the people who have volunteered their time to scan books and proof the results. without their ingredients, none of us could be making any of our pudding. and then we'll be off to the races... > fixed a small number of abuses of the [p] tag, > and changed the tag for block-style quotations > from [q] to [quote]. my analysis shows you also did the footnotes differently, and moved some punctuation inside emphasis boundaries, noted here just because you wanna record all the changes that you made to the file so you will remember next time... -bowerbird p.s. lee, your x.m.l. file starts out fairly nicely in safari (v1.2.3), but changes its look at chapter 2, and then bombs out entirely when it gets to: > her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and > the words did not come the same as they used to do: p.p.s. looks fine in firefox 1.0.5. p.p.p.s. your x.m.l. has a capitalization error in the "chapter" markup for chapter 8, which makes it display incorrectly...

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What happened to the newsletter?
by Aaron Cannon 19 Sep '05

19 Sep '05

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Wow! I just read the news letter for this week. It's been a few months since last time. How long has it been this way? When did it go from the news of Project Gutenberg to the blog of Michael Hart? How are quotes on politics relevant to the work of PG? Whether you agree with his politics or not, there are obviously going to be a lot of people who don't. What could have possibly made that seem like a good idea? Injecting such hot-button issues into the official Project Gutenberg newsletter gives the impression that we are a political organization and that we as volunteers support those views. Some volunteers might not be all that fond of that idea. What is our mission here? To give away books, or to give Michael Hart a platform from which to vent his non-ebook related political views? I have no problem with Michael Hart publishing his politics. I do have a problem with him publishing them on PG stationary. Sincerely Aaron Cannon - -- E-mail: cannona(a)fireantproductions.com Skype: cannona MSN Messenger: cannona(a)hotmail.com (Do not send E-mail to the hotmail address.) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32) - GPGrelay v0.959 Comment: Key available from all major key servers. iD8DBQFDKIbgI7J99hVZuJcRAhrrAJwNbzqBoQO0ufNfzWBT1yQqDxZJ9gCg2NF7 r8HrKCUUSlbbWp6w7BQppPc= =lrFX -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Fw: Clearance question - Mein Kampf
by N Wolcott 19 Sep '05

19 Sep '05

Curiously the Fredonia edition of Mein Kampf, translated by James Murphy, is listed as "Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. ". This would seem to indicate no copyright in the US but perhaps copyright in EU. More grist for the mill. ----- Original Message ----- From: N Wolcott To: Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2005 11:18 AM Subject: Clearance question - Mein Kampf Why is it that PG maintains the fiction that MK is still in copyright when Fredonia is publishing a PD version? Obviously they know something we don't or haven't bothered to find out. Fredonia books are printed and distriibuted in the US. Fredonia has 1770 PD books listed on Amazon.com and University Press of the Pacific (Honolulu) have 3407, many of these post 1923. Fredonia in fact lists the source they are copying in their books. I have not examined any Pacific Press books yet. It would seem that PG would not be treading in dangerous waters by following the lead of these publishers. I agree that the fact that numerous copies of MK survive on the Internet is no reason to assume PD status, but hard copy books in quantity in the US are another matter which should bear some study. I have yet to see a book by these publishers where research does not show a presumption of PD status Perhaps PG if not "pushing " the envelope, should at least crawl inside it. N Wolcott nwolcott2(a)post.harvard.edu

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PG#14068, Gordon Keith
by Andrew Sly 18 Sep '05

18 Sep '05

It's interesting to note that we've had a recent large upsurge in how often the book "Gordon Keith" by Thomas Nelson Page has been downloaded. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/14068 Anyone have an idea why that might be? Andrew

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Librivox audio books
by Branko Collin 17 Sep '05

17 Sep '05

A long long time ago, in a land far far away, I went to the Garden of Love--don't know if you remember that. In "Recording our own audio etexts" on this list I suggested that even a badly ennunciating amateur reader might produce audio books that are more pleasing to listen to than the synthesized speech versions that are currently the mainstay of the PG audio book collection. I called for other gutvols to join me in testing out this theory, but the response to that was unfortunately rather timid. If you want to have another chance to participate, now is your chance. A couple of weeks ago somebody started a project called Librivox, which takes Project Gutenberg etexts and lets volunteers record chapters of these books. After a mention on the BoingBoing blog, the project suddenly found itself with loads of volunteers, but of course can always use some more. <http://librivox.blogsome.com> The recordings themselves are in the public domain, and will be posted at the Internet Archive. If any Distributed Proofreaders want to relive the heady gold rush days of the first Slashdotting of DP, now is your chance, as the folks at Librivox still need to expand the site to allow for the grown volunteer base. -- branko collin collin(a)xs4all.nl

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plain-text files, pictures, and other formats
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 Sep '05

17 Sep '05

it won't be long at all before you have examples right in front of you of what i've said all along: plain-text files, done right, can be your "master", generating all the other formats your users want. this bears on the d.v.d. issue, because it means that you won't need to include anything but the plain-text files and the pictures, for most e-texts. someone who wants an .html version, or a .pdf, or an .rtf, will be able to generate it themselves, using the exact specs they want (font, size, etc.), using an interface tool included right on the d.v.d. there is one problem that still stands in the way: your plain-text files are _not_ being "done right". for the most part, they are very close, but there is one huge exception. your plain-text files do not have any indication of which picture-file is included where. it is typical to mark the spot of an illustration with: > [illustration: this is the caption of the picture.] but if you look at that, you'll see that -- although it nicely tells users that "a picture goes right here" -- it doesn't tell them _the_filename_ of that picture! at first, i thought this was just a simple "oversight", based on the fact that most plain-text viewers won't automatically incorporate pictures into their display... (i should note that, over here on the mac platform, the standard text-editor will indeed incorporate them, and has for about a decade. even though it does so rather clumsily, implementation-wise, it's not unknown.) anyway, i believed when i notified the people in charge that my viewer-program will happily display a picture at the point where it should be included, if they'd just include the _name_ of the picture-file it should display -- because otherwise, how would it know which one? -- that they would say, "hey, that's cool, thank you", and start putting the picture's filename in the illustration tag. amazingly, though, for reasons that i still cannot fathom, when i politely asked that this change in policy be made, the reply was a brusque "no". not only that, but when i persisted, thinking there was a simple misunderstanding, because why would they reject such a sensible suggestion, the responses got increasing hostile. and i was perplexed... leaving their hostility aside, i am still trying to be polite here. it _makes_sense_ to include the filename in the illustration tag. even the readers of a plain-text file might want to know exactly which illustration it was that goes in that spot, might they not? after all, why even tell them that "a graphic was placed here", if you're not going to inform them _which_ graphic that it was? it seems -- i don't know -- a little _silly_ to do that, doesn't it? and it makes even more sense to include the graphic filenames once you're aware of a viewer-program that will splice them in the display of the plain-text file, don't you think? i certainly do. and the real kicker here is that this graphic-filename information is _already_being_generated_, for construction of the .html file! but it is being _willfully_discarded_ from the plain-ascii file! why? i'm not asking anyone to do any extra work to include the names; in fact, it takes an extra step of work to toss out this information! why is this _useful_information_ being _intentionally_ thrown out? (i wrote a program to recover the filenames from the .html file, so i've now engineered a workaround to this problem for myself, but i wonder why it is you'd throw info away in the first place...) and so i submit -- once again -- my request to change this policy. -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] a new DVD
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 Sep '05

17 Sep '05

aaron said: > The first task is easy. right. and thus your first d.v.d. -- the one with all the e-texts that have few pictures, or none at all -- is set. > The second, not so much because > the catalog doesn't yet contain > categorical data for each title. at this point in time, i would guess that any e-text that doesn't go on the first d.v.d. (because it has more than a few pictures in it) would go on the second d.v.d. so it's set too... a third d.v.d. might contain just the audio files. (and nobody wants the human genome files.) -bowerbird

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