September 2009 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: In search of a more-vanilla vanilla TXT
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Sep '09

21 Sep '09

jim said: > You assume the reader has a personal computer. yes i do. and i consider the iphone to be a computer. (it has a chip inside it, you know.) even the kindle has a computer chip inside it. it's just too bad that you can't program for it. of course, even if amazon keeps castrating the kindle, it's entirely possible they would put a reader-program on the thing which was capable of rending z.m.l. beautifully... > Some do not. if you don't have a computer, then i simply can't tell you how you would use an e-book. > More importantly, many > do not at that point in time when they decide > they want to choose a new book to read, > such as while sitting at an airport > waiting for the plane to take off. paper books remain delightful, in my eyes... *** jim, you seem to want to argue about all these unimportant things... what about those italics? -bowerbird

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re: In search of a more-vanilla vanilla TXT
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Sep '09

21 Sep '09

jim said: > I challenge you to write such a program > to run on _my_ choice of platform: Kindle DX i wonder, jim, if you are being disingenuous on purpose? or are you just incapable of having an honest discussion? because i'm sure you know you "challenged" me to do something that cannot be done. and as much as you might like to say "that's the point", it's really _not_... because nobody else can meet that challenge either. therefore, the obvious response to this "challenge" is to do what one _can_ do, which is to custom-tailor a beautiful e-book which _can_ be read on the dx... and since the dx reads .pdf files, that's very simple! so your big "challenge" is whisked away immediately, in yet another testament to the power of plain-text... z.m.l. can create very beautiful (and powerful) .pdf, fully customized to your own personal preferences, all with just the click of a button. from a z.m.l. file. (or a p.g. plain-text file you've modified into z.m.l.) by using a program on your own personal computer. you can choose any font you like from your computer. and the leading you want. and the margins you want. and any font-size. and any font-color. and so on... it's the ultimate in personal control. people like that. and if you prefer native kindle format instead of .pdf? just do the zml-to-html conversion instead, where the .html is generated to your own personal preferences, and then convert that .html file to the kindle format... you don't have to "put up with" the settings from some online website, and hope that they'll be "good enough", since you probably cannot change them if they aren't... you get it the way you want, using your own machine, with software that you know will keep working on it... what's not to like? -bowerbird

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Re: Name lists and Big-endianism
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Sep '09

21 Sep '09

walter said: > And to that particular bird that is usually relegated to my spambox oh, and by the way, there's an important object lesson here... it's fine to put someone in your spam folder -- i do it myself -- but you should then remember that you are _not_ hearing the whole conversation, and therefore probably should refrain from commenting on any bits and pieces of text from the person who you are ignoring, because you're likely to miss something vital, and end up making yourself look silly. and what makes this doubly ironic is that -- when that other person who you are ignoring corrects you -- you won't hear that correction. but everybody else will, so you won't know that the other person made you look silly, but everyone else will know, and then -- down the line -- when everyone else knows that the person had made you look silly, you will make yourself look even sillier when you say you are ignoring them. -bowerbird

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Re: Name lists and Big-endianism
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Sep '09

21 Sep '09

walter said: > If I am looking for a book written by > a particular author, I want to be able to > search for his or her name and not for > all books about that particular author. i agree. but that's not the point at issue. the point here is that an unhealthy focus on metadata usually makes one catatonic. > I really do care whether the 'van' part > in my family names is capitalised or not i'm sure you do, walter, and bully for you, which is why it would be a shame if some o.c.d. cataloger made it uppercase for the simple purpose of fitting their sort method. sorting was very important in the old days where we had a _physical_ card-catalog, but it's silly to get bogged down in it today. the o.c.d. people, however, just love to get bogged down with any subject that they can. -bowerbird

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Mailing list
by Keith Kloosterman 20 Sep '09

20 Sep '09

Hi, Please remove me from this mailing list. Thank you. Keith Kloosterman -- I am using the free version of SPAMfighter. We are a community of 6 million users fighting spam. SPAMfighter has removed 10 of my spam emails to date. Get the free SPAMfighter here: http://www.spamfighter.com/len The Professional version does not have this message --- avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean. Virus Database (VPS): 090920-0, 20/09/2009 Tested on: 21/09/2009 9:07:27 AM avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2009 ALWIL Software. http://www.avast.com

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the wings of the dove -- 001
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 20 Sep '09

20 Sep '09

hey jim, if you're still around (and you should be), then you'll want to know i've started on that book, "the wings of the dove", by henry james. i've mounted it on my website; you can find it here: > http://z-m-l.com/go/wotdj/wotdjp123.html that's a page-by-page rendering, with a form at the bottom of each page for _reporting_errors_... you will see that the text for each page is given, as well as the scan for that page, for verification. this is in keeping with your excellent suggestion that p.g. should mount a book in such a way that other people can come along later to improve it. both the text and the scans are from archive.org. (i used the scan from the university of california.) as many people here undoubtedly know, the o.c.r. done by the o.c.a. is dreadful. most people likely think it's dreadful in the way that much o.c.r. is, namely, that it's filled with misrecognition errors. but the o.c.r. from the o.c.a. is worse. much worse. that's because their tech people there mishandle it. specifically, they _lose_ the em-dashes in the text! oh, the o.c.r. recognizes the em-dashes, but then -- somewhere in their file-handling workflow -- the o.c.a. "tech people" there lose the em-dashes! for example, look at page 9 from the book: > http://z-m-l.com/go/wotdj/wotdjp009.html you'll see that the em-dashes in the last paragraph have been dropped from the text. it's unbelievable! this problem _alone_ is enough to make the o.c.r. totally unworkable. but this isn't the only problem. (i tried to restore the em-dashes programmatically, by coding a tool, but it's less work to redo the o.c.r.) that's not all. there are more problems... if you look at the text more closely, you will see that the techies also lost the apostrophes in contractions! i did a few global changes to restore _some_ of 'em, like in the contraction "i'm", but i didn't fix them all... this is not a problem that is _common_ to o.c.a. books, but it's not a _rare_ occurrence either. stunning idiocy. and further, the hyphens on end-line hyphenates are missing as well! this sometimes happens in the o.c.r., so i'm not sure if that's what happened with this book or if end-line hyphens were lost in the o.c.a. workflow, but whatever it was, damage to the text is considerable. and like i said, these problems are rather pervasive... it's really ridiculous -- and quite sad -- that the people in charge of the technology over at the o.c.r. are idiots who have built a workflow that actually damages text... what's even worse is that -- when i've brought this to their attention -- they've responded with ad hominem attacks on _me_, as if _i_ were the guilty perpetrator... eventually, when i persisted, they finally consented to solve the worst of the problems -- the em-dashes -- but i don't know if they ever did solve the problem... meanwhile, they've banned me from their listserves, so they wouldn't have to listen to my persistent posts. talk about killing the messenger! it's appalling... the main reason this is so troubling is that the o.c.a. are supposed to be "the good guys", who are the only competitor to google. and they are badly incompetent. plus they have thin skins to boot, and they would rather _silence_ the people who point out their problems than do the work that will solve their self-induced problems. this does not bode well for our future. not well at all... anyway... the main benefit of the o.c.r. from the o.c.a. is that it has retained the structure from the original book. that means we can use a clever mash-up tool (requiring lots of elbow-grease) to use the cleaned-up text from jim and hang it on the structural scaffolding of the o.c.a. text. first, let's look at the o.c.a. text: > http://z-m-l.com/go/wotdj/wotdj.zml this is the single-file version of the .zml text for this book, the file that was used to generate the page-by-page view... now, in a separate window side-by-side with the above, let's load in (a slightly reworked version of) jim's text: > http://z-m-l.com/go/wotdj/wotdj.txt you'll see that you're able to match of the paragraphs... for instance, do a search for "she looked about her and" to find that paragraph in both windows, to sync them... so essentially, what we want to do is take the linebreaks and pagebreaks from the o.c.a. file and inject them into the (clean) e-text. we want to reintroduce the structure. (which p.g. should have never stripped in the first place.) or, to look at it in the other direction, we want to replace all of the incorrect lines of text in the o.c.a. version with the good, cleaned equivalent text from the p.g. version... once we do that, we'll have a good clean structured e-text. we'll get to that this week. gotta get some vitamin d now... -bowerbird

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Name lists and Big-endianism
by Jon Richfield 20 Sep '09

20 Sep '09

Without due respect for the dead hand of history, or the dead heads of aesthetes trying to impose attractive schemes devoid of logic or practicality, it would be nice if we could agree on some scheme to sequence our author indexes. It won't happen of course, and I am not silly enough to think that this brief note contains anything conclusive, but give it a thunk, anyone interested. Anyone uninterested is sternly forbidden to consider the matter or read this remark (it hardly hopes to attain the dignity of a suggestion.) Let us assume that we have authors such as the famous Johanna Kakebeenwania van der Merwe O'Brien, Jolien Gertina van der Poel O'Mally, Paulette Marmorella Bridhedia Paul-Ewen Truupsvor Theooseov Swizarminife Neville McSnurtle Quentin Urtel Xavier Ypres Zulrich Ürtur Aspoestertjie Sinnerella Katrina van Aswagen Gehardus Johannes Katwimpers Janse van Vuuren van den Heever Johannes Gehardus du Toit van der Vyfer Jakobus Johannes Joumoerus Vandaaigoed Lelie Belladonna Nerina Vanderker Otto Werther von und zu Bismarkharing The problem is notionally to sequence them according to a comprehensible and totally unambiguous scheme, with the least sensitivity to uncertain spellling and concentrations of initial letters etc. The best approach is to write each name, as much as desired in normal internal sequence as above, then split each name immediately after the last non-alphabetic character (including spaces). The bit at the end is what you sequence by, NOT the full name, NOT necessarily the full surname, and without consideration of case or diacritical signs. In our by no means random, but hardly unrealistic example,several questions arise, including the role of various non-alphabetic characters, and the artificial concentration of surnames under the initial letters of prefixes such as de, der, du, van, van der, von den, and no end of etcs. By sorting by the terminal alphabetic string, we remove ambiguity and even out the spread of names through the alphabet. In simple information theory this optimises search time and sort efficiency. The above example becomes: Aswagen Aspoestertjie Sinnerella Katrina van Bismarkharing Otto Werther von und zu Brien Johanna Kakebeenwania van der Merwe O' Ewen Paulette Marmorella Bridhedia Paul- Heever Gehardus Johannes Katwimpers Janse van Vuuren van den Mally Jolien Gertina van der Poel O' Swizarminife Truupsvor Theooseov Urtel Neville McSnurtle Quentin Ürtur Xavier Ypres Zulrich Vandaaigoed Jakobus Johannes Joumoerus Vanderker Lelie Belladonna Nerina Vyfer Johannes Gehardus du Toit van der The head benefit is in the de tailing. Not that anyone asked. Cheers, Jon

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Re: a case of deliberate sabotage by a p.g. volunteer
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 19 Sep '09

19 Sep '09

so, jim, i'm gonna give "wings of the dove" the whole z.m.l. treatment, so you can see it. i'm assuming that you used the copy from the university of california, at archive.org? > http://ia310110.us.archive.org/1/items/wingsofthedove01jamerich/ the other copy, from university of toronto, appears to have a 1909 publication date... by the way, do you have a copy of your file _before_ you rewrapped it, with the original linebreaks? because that would help me lots. -bowerbird

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Re: a case of deliberate sabotage by a p.g. volunteer
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 19 Sep '09

19 Sep '09

ok, it looks like the diacritic problem was an encoding glitch on my end so i apologize for that, and take it back. but the missing italics still loom large. i might also throw in a few other notes. first off, there's no table of contents in these files, either the .html or the .txt... i consider that to be plain unacceptable. it's easy enough to make, and it's useful. besides, it orients the reader to the book. i even like backlinks from chapter heads to the table of contents, for quick navigation, and previous/next chapter links are nice too. and, since there has been some discussion about title-pages, i think the title-page in the .html version is done poorly, because it's too widely spaced, which means that it needs about two screens on my monitor. (and i have a 23-inch cinema-screen here.) the whole thing needs much tighter leading. it certainly doesn't feel like a "real" title-page. oh yeah, and the .epub version of the book? no side margins at all... it looks freakish... which means that if you don't like that look, you're gonna need a reader-program which "allows" you to adjust the margins yourself. just so you know... -bowerbird

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Re: In search of a more-vanilla vanilla TXT
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 19 Sep '09

19 Sep '09

jim said: > In case anyone really wants to do it right, > what PG needs is to have each book > (and other documents) marked up semanticly. > > Of all of the exsting SGML/XML applications, > TEI seems best for what PG is doing. jim, first of all, you're wrong. and second of all, you're about 5-8 years late for this conversation. i think the archives are still available, and will give you a good idea of this long-raging debate. but thanks for giving us all a blast from the past. -bowerbird

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