April 2010 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: EBook formats on iPad via wifi
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 Apr '10

22 Apr '10

jim said: > so its not clear to me what *you* are complaining! i think he's complaining because he thought he was taking part in an actual dialog, so when he realized he'd been suckered into a bitch session, he chafed... -bowerbird

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Re: EBook formats on iPad via wifi
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 Apr '10

22 Apr '10

well, jim, i'm sorry you wasted some of your time following up on michael's suggestions. but i think if you would have phrased your complaints a bit better in the first place, you could've avoided the misunderstanding. i'm not just talking about your disingenuous means of (mis)defining terms like "e-book", either (although that is a serious error too), but a bad case of failure to qualify yourself. to my point, if you would have said this... > i have found it impossible to download > the books i want from the sites i want > in the formats i want such that i can > read them in the viewer-apps i want... ...you wouldn't have engendered opposition. indeed, you might have gotten a whole lot of sympathy. (or, realistically, a little bit.) and perhaps even received a few pointers... but that's not what you said, not at the outset. what you said initially sounded more like: > the ipad is so locked down that you > can only get the e-books steve jobs > allows you to get, and that sucks... that's a paraphrase, of course, but i think that that's what it sounded like to people. but of course we know that that's not true, not on the face of it. there's a browser on the ipad, so anything that's out on the web is something the ipad can readily display... put it this way. if i were to offer to pay you $100 for every e-book you read on the ipad, how many "e-books" could you find to "read"? yeah, that's what i thought; no shortage then. yes, there is a walled-in, locked-up section of the ipad, but we all know about that, and what good does it do to bitch about it here? it contributes nothing productive to a thread. to sum up, hyperbole doesn't work well if you don't know how to work it well... -bowerbird

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Re: Typesetting (unwrap.pl)
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 Apr '10

22 Apr '10

michael said: > Let's have the code sure thing, boss. > and install it where everyone can find/use it. great idea... > Help Newby set it up later. i don't think he will need any help, but yeah, sure. and, of course, i invite people to improve the script. -bowerbird =========================================== #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser); ########### read the user input read(STDIN, $buffer, $ENV{'CONTENT_LENGTH'}); # Split the name-value pairs @pairs = split(/&/, $buffer); foreach $pair (@pairs) { ($name, $value) = split(/=/, $pair); # Un-Webify plus signs and %-encoding $value =~ tr/+/ /; $value =~ s/%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])/pack("C", hex($1))/eg; $value =~ s///g; if ($allow_html != 0) { $value =~ s/<([^>]|\n)*>//g; } $FORM{$name} = $value; $value =~ s/\cM//g; if ($name eq "theinput") {$thebook=$value}; } if ($thebook eq "") { $thebook='paste the text you want to unwrap in this field, and click "unwrap"...' }; print "content-type: text/html\n\n"; print '<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">'; print "\n"; print "\n"; print '<head><title>unwrap p.g. paragraphs'; print '</title>'; print "\n"; print '<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">'; print '<body><pre>'; print '<form method="post"'; ######################################################### ### note that this line has to be changed to point to the appropriate place ### print 'action="http://z-m-l.com/go/unwrap.pl">'; ######################################################### print '<input align="left" type="submit" value="-- unwrap --"> '; print "\n"; print '<input type="hidden" name="unwrap" value="reporting...">'; print "\n"; print '<p align="left">'; print '<textarea name="theinput" rows=30 cols=80>'; print $thebook; print '</textarea>'; print '</p>'; print '<input type="hidden" name="hiddenname" value="hiddenvalue">'; ### the numbers here refer to a list of steps ### i posted in a message to gutvol-d ### #1 #skip #2 $thebook =~ s/\r\n/\n/g ; #3 $thebook =~ s/\r/\n/g ; #4 #skip #5 #skip #6 $thebook =~ s/ \n/\n/g ; $thebook =~ s/ \n/\n/g ; $thebook =~ s/ \n/\n/g ; $thebook =~ s/ \n/\n/g ; $thebook =~ s/ \n/\n/g ; $thebook =~ s/ \n/\n/g ; $thebook =~ s/ \n/\n/g ; $thebook =~ s/ \n/\n/g ; #7 $thebook =~ s/\n/ \n/g ; #8 $thebook =~ s/ \n \n/\n\n/g ; #9 $thebook =~ s/\n \n/\n\n/g ; $thebook =~ s/\n \n/\n\n/g ; $thebook =~ s/\n \n/\n\n/g ; $thebook =~ s/\n \n/\n\n/g ; #10 # wait! not yet! #11 $thebook =~ s/ \n /\n /g ; # maybe clone this for an asterisk in column 1, and # clone this for a number in column 1 which is # followed by a period-space in columns 2-3. $thebook =~ s/ \n>/\n>/g ; $thebook =~ s/ \n</\n</g ; $thebook =~ s/ \n\t/\n\t/g ; $thebook =~ s| \n/tab|\n/tab|g ; #12 $thebook =~ s/ \n/ /g ; print $thebook; print "</form></pre></body></html>";

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Re: a longstanding question has finally been answered
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Apr '10

21 Apr '10

michael said: > Total market. . .iPad versus Kindle, Sony and nook, leave the rest. > When will there be more iPads??? > A little spine here. . .come on! ipad had 300,000 the first weekend. it took kindle/sony/nook a _year_ to move that many. ipad has 500,000 now, less than one month out... it took kindle/sony/nook _18_months_ to sell that many. are you disputing who the eventual winner will be? or are we just arguing about how long it will take the ipad to go ahead? how long has the kindle been out now? just to make it easy on myself, i'll say that when the ipad has been out _that_long_, on that date its sales will have surpassed sales made by the kindle/sony/nook trio on that date. (and likely by a large margin.) and if you want certainty, bracket a period a-year-before that date and a-year-after... -bowerbird

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Re: a longstanding question has finally been answered
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Apr '10

21 Apr '10

michael said: > Every single time! you've never won a bet against me. ever. > Then place your bets, ladies and gentlemen!!! you've already lost. 80 million versus 3 million. > I am fine with the iPad, iPhone and iPod. you've already lost. 80 million versus 3 million. > However, I stand by my offer to accept your terms. you've already lost. 80 million versus 3 million. > What numbers over how many years. . . . the only fair way is "since made available for sale". but who needs to be fair? let the sony/kindle/nook/whatever dedicated machines (even palm and rocketbook!) have their huge head-start in time... because even with it, they've fallen far behind. > By the way, I like my cooked fowl with a little spine. cook it however you like! if you can catch it, that is... :+) > Who was it that predicted this whole cellphone thing?! so why are you backing off it now? a cellphone that's also being used as an e-reader is -- by definition -- a multipurpose machine... > By when you you think iPad will have half the market? oh, now you want to make it just the ipad? ok, no problem. > Just counting eReaders, which is to your advantage. > Even just counting Kindle, Noon and Sony??? you've already lost. 80 million versus 3 million. > I don't mean some fake "market" narrowed down in > some small portion of space-time, I mean the grand total. > Pick a date!!! "since made available for sale"... 1-year-out vs. 1-year-out, 2-years-out vs. 2-years-out, etc. -bowerbird

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Re: Typesetting (unwrap.pl)
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Apr '10

21 Apr '10

sorry, jim, i'm just a kindergartner when it comes to perl, so i'm not sure i can help with any debugging, but i'll try... > Name "main::allow_html" used only once: that was code i just pulled in, but i didn't "allow html", so, practically, you can throw out that loop altogether... (but also see the note below.) > Name "main::FORM" used only once: > possible typo at C:\JIM\Perl\bbunwrap.pl line 18. that construct is just to split the buffer, so you don't really need it. the only variable of any interest is "theinput", so just strip "theinput=" off the buffer and you're good. note that $theinput is then dumped into $thebook. (but also see the note below.) > Use of uninitialized value in read at C: that command reads the buffer that's submitted to the script when it's mounted on a website, so you'll have to rewrite it if you wanna run it offline, which is what it appears you are trying to do here. read this note: what you would do instead (and it nullifies all of the errors that we've discussed so far, is to open the text-file on your machine, put it into $thebook, and proceed to this line: > print "content-type: text/html\n\n"; > Use of uninitialized value $thebook > in string eq at C:\JIM\Perl\bbunwrap.pl line 24. looks like your version of perl wants the variables to be initialized, so just go ahead and do that... -bowerbird

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Re: a longstanding question has finally been answered
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Apr '10

21 Apr '10

michael said: > I'll take that bet. . .another free lunch of cooked fowl. pardon me? are you implying that you have won a bet against me in the past? _when?_ > I'll be that the iPad never even gets HALF > the market for eReaders over the long haul. you can't be serious. the ipad is already up to 500,000 sold. besides, by "multipurpose machine", i certainly include the iphone and the ipodtouch in there, and -- as i said -- apple has sold 80 million... they sold 8.75 million iphones in the first quarter, an _increase_ over the previous (_holiday_) quarter, which is an absolutely astonishing accomplishment. we're seeing a juggernaut, and it's gathering steam, all because they gave people multipurpose machines that can be carried around with the greatest of ease... there are some of us who _knew_ this'd be killer. (and, gee, michael, i thought you were one of us.) -bowerbird

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Re: Typesetting
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Apr '10

21 Apr '10

the original linebreaks _should_ be preserved. because some people _want_ them. and those original linebreaks _should_ be easy to remove as well. because some people _want_ to remove them. what nobody wants -- not really -- is a set of _new_ linebreaks, which have no legacy import. but even those are bearable, _if_ they can be easily removed. and let us recall, again, that project gutenberg has _not_ made available a web-service which people can utilize to unwrap p.g. e-texts... _i_ have created such a web-service. but project gutenberg has not. which is a minor failing. (i'd be happy to provide my code, if you want it.) and let us recall, again, that project gutenberg does _not_ ensure that every one of its e-texts is structured so that it can be unwrapped properly. this one is a _major_ failing. these are the two things that project gutenberg must do if it wants to proclaim that it has done all that it can to make its linebreaks a non-issue. -bowerbird

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Re: Typesetting
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Apr '10

21 Apr '10

michael said: > Like many I'm sure (all right, I'm not really sure), > I like ebooks/etexts but do not like to read them > on a computer screen. there are many people like you. most of them are old. which is to say that very few young people feel that way. it does _not_ mean that all "old" people agree with you; many oldsters are very comfortable reading on screens. > This is largely, no doubt, because I work with > a computer all day anyway--a book should be > a place to get away from it all for a little. i'm sorry you hate your job... ;+) and maybe that's part of the problem. perhaps you don't really hate reading off a screen, you just hate doing it at a computer while you're sitting at a desk. in which case an ipad might be a very nice solution... (it _would_ save some trees. or maybe just one tree. but every tree we save is one more tree on the earth.) > The natural thing to do is to > print the text out and read it. > The question then is: > how do we typeset it? boy, you _are_ old, aren't you? :+) "typesetting" is such a quaint term, charming and cute. even "desktop publishing" now seems badly outdated. > One of the last two would, of course, do in a pinch, > but I was wondering whether anyone else here > had any ideas/recipes on how to automatically or > mostly-automatically typeset a PG etext for printing. well, yeah. but what are your expectations? what are your demands? if you were to do the job for an individual e-text, perhaps like the one you mentioned, what changes would you make? let's start with ripping out the legalese and go from there... you talked about unwrapping paragraphs. you'd do that? (were they too long for you, or too short for you, or what?) of course you don't want a monospaced font, but which fonts would you settle for? times new roman? helvetica? or do you need an ability to use any font on your machine? what about paragraphing? block paragraphs, or indentation? do you want full-justification, or is ragged-right acceptable? hyphenation, or not? if you could have the original linebreaks, complete with the original end-of-line-hyphenates, would you? how about chapter-headings? page-top? recto? double-truck? curly-quotes? typographic em-dashes? footnotes or endnotes? runheads? do you want pagenumbers? if so, printed where? what pagesize would you prefer? 8.5*11? or 5.5*8.5 for 2-up? -bowerbird

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Re: Typesetting
by Morasch＠aol.com 21 Apr '10

21 Apr '10

jim said: > PG txt file is NOT AN E-BOOK FILE > because it does not meet at least > one criterion that is universally accepted > as being required of ebook file formats: > namely reflow. jim, jim, jim, jim, jim, jim, jim. it's bad enough that i call you a bloomin' idiot. but it's even worse when you come right back with a reply that _proves_ that's what you are. one of the most widely-used e-book formats in the last 20 years has been the .pdf format -- a format which has not, historically, done reflow. yet you want to rule it out _by_definition_? please. i was _fighting_ against .pdf as an e-book format for many, many years before you even showed up, but even i cannot deny that it _is_ an e-book format. _any_ file-format which can express a book _is_ -- or can be considered as -- an e-book format. you seem to think you define terms of engagement, that any discussion must be conducted according to the way that _you_ define words. that's bullcrap, jim. *** besides, even if we _accepted_ your stupid definition, it still doesn't compute, jim, because an ascii-file like the p.g. e-text format _can_ be reflowed, quite easily. you just take out the mid-paragraph hard line-breaks. _any_ e-book programmer can write code to do that... voila! reflow! -bowerbird

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