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

miss you, michael hart (placing flowers on his grave)
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 10 Dec '11

10 Dec '11

december 10th was always a special day for michael hart. it was the birthday of his father, a scholar of shakespeare. when he attained his long-sought goal of 10,000 e-books, michael timed it so the celebration was on december 10th. so, on this day he loved so much, i say "i miss you, michael". -bowerbird

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a review of some digitization tools -- 016
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 10 Dec '11

10 Dec '11

ok, let's do a table today... :+) yes, do feel free to point me to complicated tables, either moderately so (which i'll get to rather soon), or even severely complicated (for some later time). z.m.l. input file: > http://zenmagiclove.com/grapes009.txt python script to create .html output: > http://zenmagiclove.com/tday2011.py or jump directly to the new stuff, if you prefer: > http://zenmagiclove.com/cgi-bin/tday2011.py#chunk225 so, what new structures would you like to see next week? -bowerbird p.s. a couple wc3-validation errors have appeared with these last 2 additions, but not to fret, my dear, because i will kiss those little glitches tres tres soon.

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Assessing the current successes or failures of PG in various file formats.
by Jim Adcock 10 Dec '11

10 Dec '11

Over the last 24 hours I have attempted to do that which I suggested others can and should do also: namely look honestly, and objectively, as-if one were examining not PG but some other publishing house, critiquing not one's own efforts, but someone else's efforts, and ask the simple question: If PG is in the business of publishing free books for real people to read, then how well is PG succeeding in that job? What parts of the publishing job is PG succeeding at? At what parts of the job is it failing? Etc. It goes without saying that within the PG community many will consider even asking these questions high treason. These same people however have absolutely no difficulty asking, or answering to their own satisfaction, these very same questions of other publishing houses, or of the efforts of one or another PG volunteers, or of DP, for example. To perform this 24-hour gut-check I looked at the four most common file formats from the latest 10 submissions. Each file I examined from the standpoint of 9 simple more-or-less analytical measures asking "Does this file implement this common feature of e-books more-or-less correctly, i.e. more-or-less attractively, and in a more-or-less readable way? Would the PG community accept this from some other book publisher, or would we complain about that publisher's efforts?" I ranked each of these measures simply Y or N (Pass or Fail) because most of the time the answer is pretty obvious. A few cases I ranked "0" (Does Not Apply) Are these measurements somewhat subjective? Absolutely. If you don't like my measures go make your own -- you can do so in about a day's work. But please take off your PG-centric rose-colored glasses before you make these measures! I will state my summary conclusions first (which are somewhat surprising even to me) and then will follow up with the raw data: SUMMARY CONCLUSIONS 1) PG uniformly and universally fails on the issue of cover design. Cover design is becoming more and more important to allow an e-book to be even minimally usable on more-and-more ebook readers. 2) Volunteers almost universally succeed at producing high-quality HTML files in a form that PG requests: Their results are almost always attractive, "correct" and readable as an HTML file. The problem comes later when these HTML files are processed using opaque tools and unwritten rules in an attempt to create EPUB and/or MOBI from the HTML files, resulting in an after-the-fact "gotcha" to the volunteers' efforts. Why not just read the books in HTML form then? Because HTML browsers uniformly stink when it comes to trying to use that browser as-if an ebook-reader. One clear area of weakness would be regards encoding TOC in HTML. 3) Volunteers almost universally succeed at producing high-quality TXT70 files in the form that PG requests. UTF-8 has been a huge step forward in this regard. Volunteers do what PG asks of them, whether or not they personally agree with those directives. What use, if any, there are for these files I leave to BB and others to decide. 4) HTML comes close to universally succeeding as an e-book format. The problem is that there are not readily available high-quality ebook readers that accept HTML as an input format and present a pleasant reading experience for that format. HTML universally fails re cover images, fails re Publisher Pages (PG + the Original Publisher) about half the time and surprisingly fails TOC about half the time. 5) PG almost universally succeeds nowadays at the issue of char encoding. Hurray! The old issue of code pages and chars showing up displayed wrong has almost completely gone away, helped greatly I suspect by increasing use of UTF-8. I did see one case of an EPUB file with code page issues. 6) TOC is handled pretty universally badly at PG, succeeding perhaps 1/2 the time in HTML, EPUB, and MOBI formats -- but a given book might succeed TOC in one format and fail TOC in another format. 7) Punctuation choices almost always succeed in all file formats, except if one considers prosodic markings as part of punctuation (as I did in these measures) then TXT70 fails prosodic markings. 8) Sentence structure is universally successful except in TXT70 where it uniformly fails. 9) Paragraph structure is universally successful except in MOBI where it fails about half the time. 10) Chapter structure is pretty much successful, failing occasionally in MOBI and TXT70 11) Images almost always succeed (in the formats that support them) but occasionally fail in one or another formats for reasons that are not readily obvious. 12) "Publisher Pages" -- PG's plus the original publishers "title pages" fail almost universally in all file formats except for MOBI, where surprisingly they succeed most of the time. The major problem is PG added boiler plate "PG Publisher Pages and Legalese" without caring about whether those additions succeed or fail, or whether or not those pages represent PG in a positive or negative light. Given that publisher pages have been recognized for hundreds of years as "free advertising" to publishers this seems surprising, given that this lack of caring works against the PG mission. The Raw Survey Results: These are for books 38234-38243, except reported in the order 38238-38243 followed by 38234-38237 Y means "Generally Successful at this measure" N means "Generally Fails at this measure" 0 means "Measure doesn't apply to this book" [i.e. book has no images] Definition of the measures: Charset?: Does this book seem to implement charset issues correctly, or are there missing glyphs, or miss-codings of char points, or hack substitutions for chars where the "real" char was available? Sentence Structure?: Does this book display sentences in a complete and sensible manner that would be considered consistent with established paper book standards, and/or current ebook standards? Paragraph?: Does this book display paragraph indentation and/or vertical whitespace between paragraphs in a way which would be considered more-or-less consistent with the last couple hundred years of paper book publishing and/or current ebook standards? Chapter?: Does this book display chapter breaks in a way which would be considered more-or-less consistent with the last couple hundred years of paper book publishing and/or current ebook standards? TOC?: Does this book have a useful, reasonably complete TOC that is reasonably compatible with the published standards of that particular ebook file format? Images?: If the book has images, do they display in a reasonably correct useful manner? Pubpages?: Do the publisher pages display in a reasonably correct readable manner doing reasonable credit to the integrity of the brand of the original publisher and to PG as the republisher? Cover?: Is a useful cover image included that will function as expected by the standards of the file format given, and to allow a given PG book to be selected by cover in ebook readers which use cover information as a selection mechanism? Punc+Prosody?: Is punctuation and prosodic markers (bold and italic for example) presented in a way which is consistent with the last couple hundred years of paper book publishing and/or current standards of ebook publishing? RAW Survey Results: HTML charset? YYYYYYYYY sentence? YYYYYYYYYY paragraph? YYYYYYYYYY chapter? YYYYYYYYYY TOC? YNYNNYYYNN images? YYYYY00YY0 pubpages? YNYYYNNNNN punct+prosody? YYYYYYYYYY cover? NNNNNNNNNN EPUB charset? YYNYYYYYYY sentence? YYYYYYYYYY paragraph? YYYYYYYYYY chapter? YYYYYYYYYY TOC? NNYYNNYNNN images? YYNYY00YY0 pubpages? NNNYNNNNNN punct+prosody? YYYYYYYYYY cover? NNNNNNNNNN MOBI charset? YYYYYYYYYY sentence? YYYYYYYYYY paragraph? NNYYYYNNYY chapter? YYNNYYYYY TOC? NNYYNNYYNN images? NYNYY00YY0 pubpages? YNNYYYYYYY punct+prosody? YYYYYYYYYY cover? NNNNNNNNNN TXT70 charset? YYYYYYYYYY sentence? NNNNNNNNNN paragraph? YNYYYYYYYY chapter? YNNNYYYYNN TOC? NNNNNNNNNN images? NNNNN00NN0 pubpages? NNNNNNNNNN punct+prosody? cover?

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seriously, feel free to ask any questions
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 10 Dec '11

10 Dec '11

james said: > The book is this one: > http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38174 i can show you how you could've done that book in a way such that the output formats were nicer. if you'd like, just let me know. -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] seriously, feel free to ask any questions
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 10 Dec '11

10 Dec '11

ok, so it was pretty hilarious that i suckered the idiots into throwing every bit of their credibility into the pot, so they _lost_it_all_ when i showed the winning hand... i mean, they were _just_fine_ with having a war when they thought _they_ were winning; it was full-out attack-mode. they were tripping over each other, throwing rocks at me... it was only when they realized that they were gonna _lose_ that they started withdrawing, and getting as quiet as mice. but what i didn't fully appreciate was that my long play also engendered their _pride_. so now, even though they realize that light-markup is the way to go, it still makes them choke, and they can't get themselves to use it as the master-format. so it's business as usual, with every .html version as unique as a snowflake, meaning the p.g. library will have no future. marcello -- ironically, since he was the worst of the bunch -- has tried to install restructured-text as a default book-format, but the take-up over at distributed proofreaders is very slow... to his credit -- and there is very little for which we can give marcello much credit, but that's no reason not to grant it -- marcello realized that if p.g. cannot put worthwhile e-books on platforms from amazon and apple, the p.g. ship will sink. so he's _trying_ to do that. but he's also getting no help from the whitewashers, as shown by the recent post from al haines, where al actively distanced the whitewashers from the output marcello generates, saying "we have nothing to do with that." well, you know what, al?, maybe you _should_ have something to do with that. maybe you should rip that authority right out of the hands of marcello, and start doing that job yourselves... but the attack-pack here will never let you do that, will they? because they are too proud to _admit_ that they were wrong. (let alone that they were extremely cruel to boot...) -bowerbird

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Recommendations on handling family tree tables
by James Simmons 09 Dec '11

09 Dec '11

I am working on transcribing this book: http://www.archive.org/details/studyofbhagavata00benaiala This is a translation into English of an important Hindu scripture, originally in Sanskrit. Now that I have committed myself to transcribing it I find that it has many, many family tree tables in it. These are not part of the scripture itself, but were added to clear up who begat who. (All mythical characters). Some of these stretch out so wide that the page is rotated in the original. Others could easily be duplicated with ASCII characters in 80 columns or less. I've looked at some PG titles with geneologies like this one about Bach: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35041/35041-h/35041-h.html#toc49 In this one the family tree tables are treated as illustrations. That would certainly be a simple way to deal with them, but again about half of the diagrams could be done with ASCII text. It would be painful, but it could be done. So do I do half and half, or try and do all text, or just do illustrations all the way? Thoughts? James Simmons

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a checklist of conversion options
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 09 Dec '11

09 Dec '11

i'm starting a little list for myself, of the options that our conversion program should offer users, and i decided i should make it public so that if any of you have suggestions, you can inform us. in no particular order... 01. type of x/html. (html4.01, xhtml2.1, html5, mobi) 02. typographic double-quotes. (curly or straight) 03. typographic single-quotes. (curly or straight) 04. typographic em-dashes. (double-dash or em-dash) 05. paragraph indentation. (block, indented, hybrid) 06. margin-size. (body-type and indented structures) 07. leading-size. 08. font-size. 09. font-face. (body-type and various structures) 10. font-color. (body-type and various structures) 11. italics style. (font-face, color, sizing, etc.) 12. bold style. (font-face, color, sizing, etc.) 13. pagenumbers, if available. (show or hide) 14. "chunk" numbers. (show or hide) 15. background. (color or texture or neither) 16. previous/next chapter-links. (show or hide) 17. break up .html files by chapter. (yes or no) 18. indent paragraph after headers/breaks. (yes or no) 19. small-cap first line. (no, half-line, or full-line) 20. play trumpet fanfare on new chapter. (yes or no) 21. runheads and footers on pdf. (specify or not) 22. pagenumbers on pdf. (show or hide) 23. pagesize for .pdf. 24. audio and/or video. (embed it or just link to it) 25. link offline page to online page. (yes or no) 26. stylize links. (color, underline, hover, or nothing) 27. show footnotes on hover. (yes or no) 28. link indexed names to wikipedia. (yes or no) 29. online annotations. (include, link to, or ignore) 30. list of top scores at end of book. (yes or no) -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] seriously, feel free to ask any questions
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 09 Dec '11

09 Dec '11

keith said: > Whether I would say BB wants to force or would > prefer is a matter of no particular interest. i don't want to "force" anything. as for my "preference", i prefer that d.p. and p.g. will continue wasting their time and doing things the hard way just to "spite" me, while i meanwhile laugh at them because they are wasting their time and doing things the hard way just to "spite" me... and i want them to _see_ me laughing at them, and become even more determined that they will _never_ use a light-markup system as their master-format... so they waste their time and do things the hard way. seriously, that's what i prefer, as i _love_ to laugh! i don't know why this is so hard for y'all to understand. -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] seriously, feel free to ask any questions
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 09 Dec '11

09 Dec '11

keith said: > Lee want substantially identical HTML. > That is a completely different animal. i don't know that much about lee's proposal, and i don't intend to do anything to find out. from the little bit of material that you quoted, i got the impression he will provide four files that _he_ will create (i.e., probably garbled), from which he expects you'll generate output that will match a criterion which _he_ makes (i.e., probably one that's chock-full of quirks), and if you "succeed" -- in _his_ estimation -- he will give you the "prize" of a hundred bucks. he wants to give you 4 separate piles of garbage, get one brick of purified gold back from you, and then pay you peanuts. ergo, a wild-goose chase. and all to distract you from the important point: that any of those light-markup systems will work for the purpose of being the p.g. "master format", if you chose one and did the refining grunt-work. and indeed, one of them has already been chosen! but the d.p. workflow and their volunteer mind-set had -- alas -- long ago become as hard as concrete. so even that decision will mean zilch in the long run. oh well. that's the way the cookie crumbles... -bowerbird

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a review of some digitization tools -- 015
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 09 Dec '11

09 Dec '11

ok, let's add some simple lists today... :+) do feel free to point me to more complicated lists, either moderately so (which i'll get to rather soon), or even severely complicated (for some later time). z.m.l. input file: > http://zenmagiclove.com/grapes009.txt python script to create .html output: > http://zenmagiclove.com/tday2011.py or jump directly to the new stuff, if you prefer: > http://zenmagiclove.com/cgi-bin/tday2011.py#chunk220 and tomorrow, tables! -bowerbird

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