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

.tei repostings and evaluation of their .pdf versions
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

josh, i see a few of your .tei projects were reposted. i looked at your earlier .pdf versions, to evaluate them, but it was very hard to keep at the task for very long. first, they are much _improved_ over earlier attempts, so whoever is refining the xslt -- marcello? you? both? -- deserves some warm encouragement for that. keep it up! in their current state, the .pdf's kind of remind me of a young pre-teen girl. her face might well _be_ pretty, but it's difficult for us to tell, because we can't look at it for long enough to decide, since it's covered with pimples... the "pimples", in your .pdf files, are widows and orphans. to the typographically knowledgeable, they're eyesores. and since they appear so frequently within your .pdf's -- practically every other page-spread -- it's distracting, distracting enough that it's impossible to see much else... fortunately, i think there is probably some easy setting that you can make to eliminate all the windows/orphans. indeed, you might even have made that change already! have you? if so, i'll look at the .pdf's that were reposted, and we can move on to some less-obvious points... -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] Clearance question - Mein Kampf
by Wallace J.McLean 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

>From Marcello Perathoner <marcello(a)perathoner.de> > "Mein Kampf" was written in 1924 and Hitler died in 1945, so copyright > has not expired in the US and in Europe. We may argue over who owns the > copyright, but not over the fact that it still is copyrighted. That is not a "fact", or at least not a complete fact: most of the countries of the world, with most of the world's population living in them, have a life+50 term of copyright. Even if the work is still under copyright -- setting aside the idiotic issue of determining ownership now -- in Germany and the US, in most of the world, the book no longer has copyright subsisting in it. And that "most of the world" is about to get a lot larger, when the "life+60" copyright in India expires, if it hasn't already. (Not sure whether India has the "and to the end of that year" wrinkle, or not.) Whatever the status of the work in Germany, from where I am typing, Mein Kampf is, for better or for worse, at least in its original language, a public domain book.

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re: [gutvol-d] html header-stuff, doctype and content-type
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

lee said: > <?xml version="1.0" encoding="us-ascii"?> > <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" > "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> > > <head> > <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii" /> thanks lee. but this has me claiming the file is a form of xhtml, and not just the straightforward-plain-and-ordinary .html that it is. (i believe it would run in a 1997 browser.) what would the lines look like that would support this type of just-the-basics .html file? of course, i don't need anything more than the [html] at the top to get it to actually _work_ in a browser -- any browser -- and work just fine. so this is just an exercise in getting the file _validated_, so that it can pass the "requirement" of getting it posted. > Note that if your file truly _is_ 100% ASCII you could use > "utf-8" or "iso-8859-1", or even "windows-1252" > in place of "us-ascii", because for values less than 128 > all three of these encoding methods are identical. right. but i would prefer to make the claim as minimal as possible -- to reflect the actuality of the file -- not as maximal as possible... -bowerbird p.s. as for "tidy", thanks for all your open-source work on it...

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new CD compilation
by Aaron Cannon 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 For a while now we've been kicking around the idea of an non-English language collection of PG Etexts. I've created a sample compilation which you can take a look at and make suggestions. http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/pgiso/published.php I'd like to also add some books which are unrestricted by language barriers. Any suggestions? I've already put the Hand Shadows book on there, but would be interested to hear any more ideas. We've got about 75MB left to fill. Perhaps some of the music files. Thanks! 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. iD8DBQFDKc4TI7J99hVZuJcRAsiKAKC+ioeqlP07cQZLg87k+XLwU7moTgCgoIH6 zh+ayuUsWADen8aJb66ZS5c= =T/hw -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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re: [gutvol-d] question for DPers
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

michael said: > Don't forget "compilation copyright." > It might not be as legal as some would think. if you culled out e-texts that are not in _your_ library, you wouldn't have to worry about that in the slightest. -bowerbird

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a new DVD
by Aaron Cannon 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I know I've brought this up in the past, but I've never been able to reach an agreement or even a workable solution. Since we have the ISO creator in place and building DVDs has just gotten a whole lot easier, perhaps its time to try again. The DVDs and CDs that we are currently distributing, as many of you know, are from 2003. They were great for their time, and are still excellent collections. However, I believe we should generate a new compilation for distribution. The question is what should be included? My personal feeling is that we should be distributing a DVD and CD with as many books as possible, even if that means excluding the pictures which go along with many of them. The reason I feel this way is because our discs are going to various parts of the world where such collections are virtually unheard of or unavailable. Many of those discs are going into schools and literally tripling (or more) their library collections. These people are happy to receive pictures along with those books, but that is secondary IMHO to what they really want and that is more books. If someone wants pictures, they will almost certainly go somewhere else. But, when people want books, they come to Project Gutenberg, and that IMHO is what we should give them. That's not to say that we shouldn't include pictures on the DVD. But I do think that they should be secondary. Some books absolutely need pictures to have any value. The Hand Shadows book is a good example. Identifying all of them might be a challenge though. Now, I have to admit that as a blind person I may be a bit biased, and that is why I am seeking your input. The next time we send a DVD to South Africa, what should be on it? 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. iD8DBQFDKb8bI7J99hVZuJcRAumAAJ93OONK550dtCfK/R6r+zt3hOIuXQCfbDEJ O2jNTHQJGSlUstnbA4ACtmc= =6xxD -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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re: [gutvol-d] What happened to the newsletter?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

michael said: > If you'd like to see something different, all you have to do is make > it your own way, and we'd be only too glad to give you a shot. i enjoy your news clips _and_ your individual commentaries on them. -bowerbird

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question for DPers
by Aaron Cannon 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Does anyone have a list of the EBook numbers which were done by Distributed Proofers? The reason I ask is because it might be kind of nice to feed that list to the new ISO creator to compile a DPDVD. Just a thought. I know it's been talked about, but I haven't heard if it has been done yet. 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. iD8DBQFDJwXHI7J99hVZuJcRAttGAJwMWjMXRLvb08fWGfVzbAawzKPU2QCfUTtJ MgiJlLn+brt6u3DJ5LhCdBU= =ZG0o -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Charlie Parker
by Wallace J.McLean 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

> From Marcello Perathoner <marcello(a)perathoner.de> > Date Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:14:19 +0200 >> The other group are digitial media users, >> those who purchase various types of digital and electronic media >> (audio CDs, DVDs, etc.) I'm not sure how big this group is, but it no >> doubt is in the many 10s of millions in the U.S. > How many of these listen to, say Charlie Parker, and would profit by a > reduction of copyright duration? Ask British Airways. They paid the Gershwin estate a gazillion dollars for the use of "Rhapsody in Blue", a work which is in the public domain in most of the world, but not in the UK's life+70 universe, or in the subverted public domain in the US. Indeed, the Gershwin estate were among the biggest backers of the Sonny Bono Act.

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Encoding statement in HTML PG Header
by Joshua Hutchinson 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

This refers to the standard PGheader information we include at the beginning of all of our documents. For instance: Title: The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary Author: Anne Warner Release Date: May 6, 2005 [eBook #15775] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** The character set encoding line makes sense for text files. However, for HTML files it begins to make a little less sense. First of all, an HTML file usually contains an encoding line in the HTML header itself. <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" /> But, this information just refers to how the HTML file is encoding, not necessarily what character set is actually displayed in the browser. For instance, a HTML document encoded in ISO-8859-1 can still contain all sorts of UTF-8 characters. You just have to escape them out (&#xxxx) to get the browser to display the UTF-8 character. So, in that case, if we put a character set encoding line in the PGHeader, which do we use? The file itself is ISO-8859-1 ... but the characters displayed in your browser include UTF-8. Or vice versa ... if you create a HTML doc encoded in UTF-8, but it contains nothing by ASCII characters, which do you say in the PGHeader? My reason for asking this is because currently the TEI->HTML conversion doesn't list a character set encoding in the PGHeader. Should it? How should the automated system determine what to put there if we have that line? I'm looking for opinions and hopefully a consensus can be reached. Josh

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