October 2011 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: [gutvol-d] these grapes are sweet -- lesson #21c
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 19 Oct '11

19 Oct '11

a little more, while i'm thinking about it... there is some other code i will not share, for various reasons. i'm not going to show how to generate the .ncx and .opf files. that's because it cost me days and days of time and frustration to find out just exactly what was required in these stupid files. the .epub people didn't care how much complexity they piled onto the person who wanted to create an .epub file... indeed, it rather seems they attempted to make it as hard as possible. perhaps because it is the corporate publishers who controlled this format, and they didn't want self-publishers to compete? it's not the first time we've caught them dragging their feet on the e-book revolution, and i suspect it won't be the last, either. when you've done similar legwork to crawl through the crappy "standard" they crammed down our throats, and you're ready to curse the people who created .epub, we can compare our notes. next, i'm not gonna show you how to generate a .pdf either... i bought a commercial plug-in to help me, so if you want to struggle through the slough of open-source stuff, have at it. i just don't wanna work so hard to get something "at no cost". finally, all this stuff that i'm showing you is stuff i developed years and years ago. i've done a _lot_ more, especially since, and i'm certainly not going to hand over the code for all that. or even any code that paves the way to simplify reproducing it. but if you are willing to pay the price -- it runs six figures -- you can buy it all and release it as "open source" to the world. of course, if you just want to _use_ the software, it's cost-free. -bowerbird

2 1

since jim is unwilling to give up his disingenuous pose
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Oct '11

16 Oct '11

since jim is unwilling to give up his disingenuous pose, let me spell things out for you, so everyone understands. jim has looked at my pdf's, and what he found there was plain old unstyled text. now, since this particular book consists of very little styling to begin with -- it's almost totally and completely plain-old-paragraphs, with just the chapter-headers and front-matter and two cases of blockquotes -- that's not much of a "flaw", but if you're jim, you're willing to grasp at any possible straw you can. so let me be clear: the chapter-headers are unstyled, as is the front-matter, and those blockquotes, and the occasional cases of italics. so, for instance, the headers are _not_ big, bold, and centered, as in a final product. italics are indicated only by _surrounding_ _underlines._ blockquotes have the ">" at the beginning of each line... the front-matter isn't centered, like it was in the p-book, or bold, like a title-page should be. so... get the picture? now, could i have done all that styling and formatting? well, yes, obviously, i could have... i've done it before. and, if you care to notice, i put the chapter-headers in the .pdf table-of-contents sidebar, so i recognized 'em. (and because the sidebar is a useful capability, i did it.) but any styling and formatting was _beside_the_point_ i was making with the current demos, so i didn't do it... my point was that you can chop the output many ways, including by page, paragraph, chapter, or _not_at_all_. you can put formatting in, or leave it out, _your_option_. because sometimes ya don't need formatting in the way. most especially when -- as was one of the use-cases -- you have an editor go over every paragraph in the book. my workflow is broad enough to embrace the author who might be _in_the_process_ of actually _writing_ their book. maybe jim doesn't care about that; fine, he doesn't have to. but there's no reason to let his blinders cut off your vision... -bowerbird

1 0

jim seems to want me to start ignoring him again
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Oct '11

16 Oct '11

jim said: > if those are your examples, then I also > encourage readers of this thread to go take > a good look at them and judge for themselves. why don't you make your points directly, jim, so they can be addressed directly, instead of going the slimy route by trading in innuendo? *** jim said: > [Not exactly sure how BB > comes up with his measures!] again, then why don't you just ask directly, jim, instead of trying to imply there is subterfuge? i wrote a program that delivers those numbers. (what?, did you think i count them one by one?) if you want, i can have it generate some output that would give everyone irrefutable proof, jim. do you want that proof, jim?, or are you happy and satisfied just that you got a smear-job in? i guess i'm going to have to kill-file you again. not only do you actively fail to contribute value to the conversation, you actually make it worse. -bowerbird

2 1

modern methods of book composition
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Oct '11

16 Oct '11

andre said: > The Internet Archive has 3 copies from 3 different sources. i see 4. but who's counting? and of the ~15000 lines in this book, approximately 9,000 have identical o.c.r. across all 4 digitizations, with another 3,000 that have identical o.c.r. across 3 of the 4 digitizations, meaning that the "problem lines" can be boiled down to a fairly small subset... i'm busy with another project right now (thanks, alpha-testers!), so if someone else wants to do that research, go ahead please... -bowerbird

2 1

Re: [gutvol-d] some pdf's for you to look at, and consider
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Oct '11

16 Oct '11

jim said: > I'm sorry, but *what* were the links in this latest BB email > supposed to be examples of ??? just providing more and more concrete examples, jim, of the power and flexibility of the z.m.l. format as a "master". so when the tei/xslt folks get their shit together (...right...) they'll know what kinds of output they will need to emulate. (yes, jim, i know that -- unlike 2003, when i arrived here -- the vast majority of techies don't see x.m.l. as "the future", but rather view it as a wrong turn they shouldn't have taken, and have long since abandoned that wrongheaded approach. but some of the crusty people here didn't receive the memo. so it's great entertainment to make fun of their ineptitude... just like how it was when my nephews gave me a jump-rope as a birthday present; what could i do except laugh along?) *** it was also a demonstration of the equivalence of outputs in html form and pdf form, since there is the longstanding belief that those formats are at opposite ends of the pole. when really you can make them as similar as you want... *** and, if you must know, it was laying down the groundwork to provide cover-fire for my upcoming assault upon epub, because it's time to put that travesty out of its misery too... -bowerbird

2 1

Re: [gutvol-d] call for alpha testers
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 Oct '11

14 Oct '11

benjamin said: > I will volunteer, then. :) great! but let's do all these things backchannel, folks. no sense cluttering the list with it. thank you... -bowerbird

1 0

call for alpha testers
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 Oct '11

14 Oct '11

i will soon be releasing a text-editor that outputs a file to e-book formats. crossplatform to mac, p.c., and linux. if you'd like to alpha-test it, send me an e-mail and i will shoot you a copy. -bowerbird

2 1

FW: Build our own DP, anybody?
by Dan Weber 14 Oct '11

14 Oct '11

Jim At the risk of starting a war, I disagree. The foreign language books will never be read by most people who visit Gutenberg.org. Almost all people from the USA will be reading English language books. I do not download and will never have time in my lifetime to read these other books. I think the other language books should be on another site. I do think that the books should be digitized, but not listed with the main site's inventory. There could easily be a Gutenberg-spanish.org, Gutenberg-dutch.org, etc.to handle these books. Dan Weber My criteria has always been that if "enough" people want to read it, it's worth doing. Where "enough" is a pretty small number -- if people collectively spend more time reading it than I spend making it, it's probably a "success." Because I'm not putting in the effort in the first place unless [at least on some masochistic level] I'm enjoying the effort. Surprisingly, to me at least, looking at first 30-day download counts of recent additions it seems like just about everything meets this test. "Weak" performers would seem to be the less-common foreign language books, but I don't think people reading this thread would agree that would be a reason not to "want" them. _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d

8 9

some pdf's for you to look at, and consider
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 13 Oct '11

13 Oct '11

it's _one_ thing for me to call some of you "stupid idiots"... but i must admit, it's much nicer when you come and post and _prove_ that yes, indeed, you really are "stupid idiots". what's curious, though, or perhaps downright fascinating, is how stupid idiots can argue with _other_ stupid idiots... at any rate, it's all been very amusing... :+) and i do wish you wouldn't stop, not quite yet, ok? ;+) *** but... for the lurkers... if you need solid food to lay down a base for your popcorn as you view the proceedings, here are some pdf's for you... actual product -- not just opinions flung at you, like dung. all of these were churned out from our "master" z.m.l. file for the mabie book; none of 'em required special handling. > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes007.txt but first, of course, the backdrop... *** remember the old days, when we had delineation between the paper-page-focused pdf vs. screen-reflowable html? yeah, well, maybe not so much, these days. first, designers have increasing shut down "reflowability". web-page-width is increasingly defined in terms of "ems", which means that increasing font-size increases the width. it's also the case that "command-plus" to "increase size" in a web-browser has increasingly come to mean "zoom" the entire page, rather than simply increasing font-size... each of these developments causes the same bad effect: the characters get bigger, but the number of 'em in a line stays the same, because the line itself got longer as well. sometimes to the point where it's longer than the screen, so we again see cases of the dreaded horizontal scrollbar, a horror we thought we'd eliminated about a decade ago. another impacting factor is the new popularity of machines -- like the ipad, and the kindle, and the nook, and so on -- without resizable windows, or windows at all! you get one screensize! that's it! and for iphone and ipad, even when you rotate the screen, the window's _dimensions_ stay the same. (oh, and there is no "increase the fontsize" command on the iphone or the ipad; you are stuck with the designer's specs.) apple is even migrating the "one-app-using-the-full-screen" mentality back to the desktop, with their new version of lion. so the "reflow" aspect of html is steadily being downplayed... *** the other side of the pdf=fixed vs. html=reflowable contrast -- namely that pdf is "a frozen format" -- is one my apps are steadily challenging, with an "on-the-fly" pdf-creation power. if i don't have to just take whatever pdf somebody else created, but can rather generate it to my personal custom specifications regarding pagesize, font, fontsize, leading, and everything else, then pdf as a format has just lost lots of its former deficiencies. don't get me wrong... i've been an enemy of pdf for _so_long_ that i'll never consider it to be an ally, let alone a good friend. but people who've grown up without my prejudiced experiences, who are facing the field of e-books for the very first time, might well come to greatly prefer their _self-customized_ pdf output over the formless blob they get from most e-book viewer-apps. heck, haakon wium lie, one of the godfathers of c.s.s., just did a big press event where he advocated a new method whereby a web-page too big for one screen would be "split" into pages, so users could "swipe" to go forward or back through the pages. > http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20118 457-264/opera-proposal-brings-a-book-look-to-the-web/ he said: > "Doing pages on a screen I think will be very important, > especially for tablets." but, of course, such "pagination" was one of the things that was scorned by the early advocates of html, arguing against the pdf. and if you need the official stamp of the corporate publishers too, "fixed layout" mode is the flavor of the month in the .epub world... along these same lines, there are the book-designers who -- as misguided as they might be -- still keep demanding that _they_ be given the ability to _veto_ any design changes made by users. some of them even want to prohibit us from changing fontsize! but all of them are adamant that pages be displayed as designed. and in addition, all high-profile e-magazines have tended to be simple graphic-file image-flipper apps. (yeah, severely bloated.) that's a darn good way to ensure users can't change your display. of course, there are rather nasty side-effects that come along too. at least you can do a text-search on a pdf! not on a set of images! of course, moving back to pdf, the "classics" app -- the very first e-book app to catch on in the app store, even getting the honor of having their icon shown in an apple commercial, as well as the accompanying bump in sales -- stores its books internally as pdf. and finally, coup de grace, the ibooks app doesn't scroll, does it? heck no, it paginates the book, and you swipe to turn the pages, whereupon you get both a page-curl and a page-turn animation. rip! rap! batman! where did that skeuomorphic crap come from? all i can say is, if you thought the pdf/html delineation was clear, you were wrong, and you're becoming more wrong by the minute. *** fortunately for me, i don't have to go back into that cesspool of "pdf vs. html", because i support both, and let my _users_ decide which one they want, or both (if that's what they choose instead). both pdf and html are just "output formats", far as i'm concerned, and both of them can be generated with one simple button-click. and furthermore, both of 'em are destined for e-book extinction. no one will bother with "generating an output format" which they read in a viewer-program (acrobat or a web-browser) that gives an inferior experience, when they can view the .zml "master file" directly, with a superior app, and without any button-click hassle. not in the long run. not once they've learned the full set of facts. but in the meantime, we'll generate html output, and pdf output. so here are a few pdf files showing the types of output possible, pdfs which demonstrate their direct relationship to html output. *** the "secret" of generating a pdf that seems more like "a website" than a paper-based product is to forget using a fixed pagesize, and instead size each page of the pdf whatever it "needs" to be, depending on the content which you have placed onto that page. here's the first example: > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/pdf-sample01.pdf this pdf consists of _one_page_, which contains the entire book. in this sense, it's equivalent to its single-page web-page cousin: > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes122.html to make the comparison most striking, narrow the html window in your web-browser until it becomes the same width of the pdf. *** here's the second example: > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/pdf-sample02.pdf in this file, each _chapter_ is put onto a separate page in the pdf -- so it's akin to our folder with each chapter on a separate web-page. > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes123-folder.html indeed, each chapter-header in this pdf is an actual _link_ to the web-page in that folder with the respective chapter, so we have an example of the _synergy_ that can be created between the pdf (which can be offline) and the online version. to the extent that "social networking around books" becomes something important -- it's being inflated by hype right now, but it _could_ become big -- this synergy could be quite vital. the best way to view this pdf, to see the intended effect, is the "single page continuous" mode, so each page falls underneath the previous page, creating a display similar to the pdf above... *** and here's a third example: > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/pdf-sample03.pdf in this pdf, each _paragraph_ from the book is on a separate page. and the facing page is completely blank. hey, what's up with that? your first reaction might be that this is stupid, that it's "wasteful", in the sense that many of the paragraphs don't use up a full page. (and that description even ignores that every other page is blank!) but of course that's silly, since these are all just _electrons_, son. furthermore, there are some good use-cases where such a pdf can be quite useful, such as when an editor goes over your book. the blank facing page opposite each paragraph is a place where that editor types in the notes and suggestions for that paragraph. go ahead and try it out... just click in the field, and start typing... then, when you quit, you will be asked if you want to save the file. *** so there you go. three examples of different pdf output files, each geared to a specific use-case, with direct correspondence to an equivalent design rendered in html. indeed, if you view those pdf online, using a web-browser (like chrome or safari, but not firefox, which has a lousy pdf viewing capability), then your experience is _amazingly_ similar to the html equivalent. -bowerbird

2 1

libraries (and taxpayers) being robbed by publishers
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 13 Oct '11

13 Oct '11

i've mentioned this outrage before, but libraries (and taxpayers) are being robbed by publishers... here's a blog post by a librarian: > http://cdstacked.blogspot.com/2011/10/library-journalschool-library-journal… here's a publisher with a "list price" of $35 for an e-book. that's pretty bad, a sign of a publisher that doesn't get it... but hey!, amazon offers it at a "bargain" price of just $24. and you can get it even cheaper at the sony store, for $19. yep, $19 (or more) for a file that costs 0 cents to reproduce. that makes a lot of sense, yes it does, a whole lot of sense... but just be glad that you ain't a library, little miss sunshine. because if you were, this same e-book would cost you $105. no, that's not a typo. one hundred and five dollars, american. remember this tidbit the next time you hear publishers whine. -bowerbird

1 0