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

re: [gutvol-d] bb's alice uses copyrighted font
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Sep '05

28 Sep '05

gardner said: > The copyright police will not be > breaking down BB's door on that account. whew! you know i was _so_ worried about that. anyway, thanks to cyberspace, they will certainly know just how and where to contact me if they do want me... but i thank you for your reassurances, gardner! ironically -- and i apologize -- but if they _do_ come after me, i fully intend to blame canada. -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] here's that alice pdf
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Sep '05

28 Sep '05

gardner said: > I have found that many actual PG texts contain capital letters. > You might consider extending your test suite accordingly. believe it or not, i have an all-lower-case option in my viewer! :+) but you're welcome to convert the test-suite to "proper" caps. heck, you can even convert it to all-caps if you want? ;+) -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] here's that alice pdf
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Sep '05

27 Sep '05

well, i sent that post i promised. but it's being held up for moderator approval. no, i haven't been subjected to mother-may-i again; it's because the post was too big, over a 40k limit... a whopping 55815k. told you it was big. roughly 1/3 the size of "alice" itself. if you haven't already read the book, i highly recommend you do that first. or instead, as the case might be... gardner, you better schedule 90 minutes instead. :+) -bowerbird p.s. you can also feel free to look at this, give you something to do: > http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/test-suite/test-suite.zml

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thanks for caring
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Sep '05

27 Sep '05

gardner said: > I care. oh good! :+) i put the odds at 80% that there was one person on this listserve who cared. i just didn't know if 8/10ths of a person would round up to one, or down to none... at any rate, i've composed a long response, which is almost finished, and i'll post it today, or tomorrow, maybe thursday, so you should set aside an hour or so on your schedule for it. oh, and thanks for caring... ;+) -bowerbird p.s. if you want a preview of the visual aid, it's up: > http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/alice01/alice01/alice01breaks.html p.p.s. lee, if i want a 2-up facing-pages display in my "user agent", how do i ask it for that? .pdf is one of the few ways that i know of... which is not to say that i'm a fan of the format. as you know, i hate it. but let's be real and fair about it. plus lots of folks seem to like it a lot...

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Re: [gutvol-d] here's that alice pdf
by Joshua Hutchinson 27 Sep '05

27 Sep '05

> To be honest, I haven't looked at any of these competing PDF expressions of > Alice, because I can't see how PDF has any value at all to an end user. > Arguing about how PDF should be presented is much more a discussion of angels > and pinheads than _any_ XML discussion that has ever occured on this list. For online reading, I completely agree. For instances when you want a printed version, though, the PDF tends to "look" the best. Plus, for some reason, its tends to be more impressive to the unwashed masses (read: my mother). Josh

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re: [gutvol-d] O.k., looked more closely at the current ZML spec -- my specific thoughts
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 26 Sep '05

26 Sep '05

robert said: > Most verse can be distinguished from prose > by the preponderance of > capitalization at the beginnings of lines, and > the preponderance of punctuation at the ends of lines right. and when it happens to utilize end-line rhymes, those are pretty easy for a machine to spot as well... :+) but did i miss something? have end-users started clamoring for machines to track down poetry now? even though i'm a performance poet, not a print poet, a development like that would be encouraging to me! alas, i fear there is no such clamoring, i am sad to say... > which heuristics work until you meet e e cummings. no heuristics work for cummings. :+) the definition of imaginativeness is that it defies heuristics. > But then, it has always struck me that > the goal of zml is to meet 90% of your needs, > 90% of the time. it's improving all the time, so the goal is now 93% of your needs, 97.2% of the time... ;+) -bowerbird p.s. the "current" z.m.l. spec is over a year old now. i don't think it's changed much, if at all, in that time, but it's not "new" to anyone who has been listening... p.p.s. if you find any people who _need_ poetry, please do be sure and let me know, right away!

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O.k., looked more closely at the current ZML spec -- my specific thoughts
by Jon Noring 26 Sep '05

26 Sep '05

I looked again at Bowerbird's ZML "11 Rules" (forgot they were given in his latest beta demo-app, "give", which has been sitting on my hard drive for a few weeks.) Overall they are written pretty clearly albeit in Bowerbird's quirky yet entertaining style (there were a couple minor ambiguities, but nothing major enough to mention here.) What I found odd is that there appears to be no way in the current ZML spec by which paragraph-level blocks of text, which are other than basic paragraphs or headers or drama, may be specifically identifiable by machine processing. Essentially these structures are all lumped together, and are "visually" styled using tabs/spaces. They can include diverse document structures such as verse (poetry), block quotes, a letter, an epigraph (which in turn can include verse), a newspaper article, and various other things -- even "visual art" (such as the "river of text" in "Alice In Wonderland.") The most important of these non-paragraph blocks of text is verse. We'd *at least* like to see verse blocks to be unambiguously identifiable by machine processing, with some rule to tell authors "if you want to include some poetry, this is what you do...".) This will be useful for improving visual presentation options, will enhance accessibility (that is, the verse can be presented to the listener as verse and not as generic prose in text-to-speech engines) and may even aid more advanced searching mechanisms (which can be focused to search only in particular structures such as verse, for example.) In the ZML paradigm, one may think that one can identify verse by making a line within a block of text to be indented and non-reflowable. But this, in and of itself, is not sufficient since there are a host of other things found in texts which are not verse but which look something like it (e.g, the "river of text" mentioned above.) However, what might work in ZML is to "flag" a non-reflowable line as being part of verse by prefacing it with a specific sequence of white space characters, such as "space-tab-space", or whatever makes sense. Then a machine will know that a particular line of text is verse, yet the digital text will visually follow the ZML plain text paradigm. In addition, this technique could also be used to identify a few other non-paragraph structures by using a different sequence of white space. TEI devotes a whole chapter on the basic markup for Verse: http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/VE.html This shows the power of XML to markup verse in pretty fine detail. Another area in ZML that creates various problems (including for text-to-speech engines), and in general is quite limiting, is the use of italics, bold, etc. for emphasized text. We really want a system where we semantically explain *why* text is emphasized (since by conventions text emphasis is used for a host of things and people have to "figure" it out by textual context, something which can't yet be done by machine (requires human-level intelligence, something which does not appear to be on the horizon for quite a few more years.) There are a few reasons why in the master text it is good to say why something is emphasized, and not just say that it is emphasized. One reason is text-to-speech engines. With understood semantic information (the "why"), the text-to-speech engine (TTS) can present the emphasized text appropriate to the semantics. For example, if the emphasized text is simply linguistic or literary emphasis, the TTS can inflect the voice to reflect such emphasis. However, if the emphasized text is a title to a book or manuscript, or is a foreign phrase, a name of a ship, or one of several other things that visual text emphasis is used for, the TTS can present the text appropriately. Who wants their TTS to generically say "this is italicized ... text ... end of italics"? There are also other advantages to specifying "the why" of text empahsis, such as enabling more power search routines, more automated linking, etc. -- for example, we'll know where to find the titles of books and manuscripts since they will be identified rather than just "italicized" or made "bold". Definitely it will be nigh impossible within the ZML paradigm to explain the "why" of empahsized text, but trivial to do with XML since XML has *no inherent limitations* on the extent and depth of structuring content. (XML also solves the issue of identifying the exact structure of paragraph-level blocks of text as discussed earlier in this message.) ***** In summary, ZML is a good attempt at trying to bring order to plain text -- and as such is a viable format for plain text documents used only as plain text. But as a multi-purpose *master* text format it is too limiting. ZML is also not very accessible, at least to the level the accessibility community would prefer. Jon Noring

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Article about PG
by Andrew Sly 26 Sep '05

26 Sep '05

I've recently done a major overhaul of the Wikipedia article about Project Gutenberg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg The content of Wikipedia is copied to many places all over the web (rather like PG texts) and this article could be the first exposure to PG for many people. Anyone interested in suggesting ways to improve it would be welcome to email me--or, given the nature of a wiki, go ahead and edit it themselves. Andrew

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re: [gutvol-d] Article about PG
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 26 Sep '05

26 Sep '05

andrew said: > Although factual instances of others saying > "Project Gutenberg is really great!" could be reported. i didn't so much mean "really great" per se... i rather meant that whenever people say that "you can find books online", the predominant place that they point to is project gutenberg. there are other libraries that might (do) have better-looking e-books, but they do not have the high profile that project gutenberg enjoys. -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] Article about PG
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 26 Sep '05

26 Sep '05

greg said: > This is a nice update, and > seems pretty even-handed. i too consider it to be very even-handed... which might (or might not) be meaningful. i also found it to be just a bit too modest. project gutenberg has the honor of being the "digital library" that is most mentioned by different stripes throughout cyberspace, with a high profile recognized by unknown tom, dick, and harry's right up through cory, and i think it would not be unreasonable to remark on this fact of its singular visibility... perhaps also of importance -- if it can be expressed in a way that is non-evaluative, yet nonetheless highlights the vital point -- would be to contrast the _philosophy_ of project gutenberg's "unlimited distribution" with other digital libraries that attempt to control how their e-texts are being used... -bowerbird

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