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

Re: time after time
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Feb '11

28 Feb '11

keith said: > I honestly, thought that you were > serious about creating a useful tool, > but I must sadly admit you are not what? you cannot see how a tool that turns a plain-text file into .html and .epub and .mobi would be _useful_ to p.g., d.p., and the world at large? seriously? are you daft? because i can assure you that _some_ people have no trouble at all seeing it. no trouble. at all. meanwhile, p.g. (as run by marcello) stumbles along trying to make r.s.t. (1) work, and (2) acceptable to d.p. > It is very sad. A very poor joke. > It, also shows that you have no real interest > in helping the PG community in any way. the p.g. community? you mean the people who insulted me for years on this listserve, and attacked me viciously in a wolf-pack? _that_ community? including the marcello, who put up a _website_ trying to spite me? (little did he know how badly all that would backfire when he had to eat his words and adopt light markup, _proving_ i was right! ironic that he saved all my i-told-you-so's. next he'll probably sic the paparazzi on me.) in case there is any doubt left in your mind, let me assure you that i have zero interest in "helping" _that_ particular community... i'm quite sure there are some good people here, but that vicious attack-pack sure shut them up... > Nor due do you have any respect for the PG cause! i paid my due respect to p.g. for _many_ years, and i continue to serve the cause of electronic-books, and i have zero need for your assessment of that... so, are we clear on _that_ too? but cheer up, keith! nothing to be sad about! :+) -bowerbird

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Remastered versions of generated epubs
by Robert Gibbins 28 Feb '11

28 Feb '11

A few weeks ago, I appended to this forum asking if PG was interested in hosting hand-crafted epubs. Such replies as I received suggested that this was not BAU for PG at the moment. So, although I would rather have offered them to PG, I have just added 6 of these to the MobileRead website. I have retained the PG branding and credited the volunteers who produced the originals - please let me know if you think this is breaking the license terms, I can easily anonymise them. The intention of remastering is simply to make the books easier to read on an inherently limited portable e-reader. (I haven't knowingly made any decisions of taste as I have no ambition to be a book designer or typographer.) The remastering includes: - breaking the xhtml up into smaller files (one per chapter plus one each for front and back matter. - paginating the front and back matter into title page, edition notice, contents, etc. - cleaning up the existing hyperlinks, where necessary. - adding some hyperlinks (at chapter heads)- you might disagree with doing this, I haven't entirely made up my mind myself. - toning down some of the markup (font sizes and margins) to better fit onto the limited size of an e-reader screen. - changing some of the markup to be more scalable and reflowable (usually by expressing font sizes, margins, offsets, etc in what I hope are more scalable units). If you have any comments on whether the remastered books are either more or less readable than the generated originals, please append either to this forum or to the MobileRead threads documented below. I'm particularly interested in what does or doesn't work on particular devices as I have only one device (a Sony Reader) on which to test the books. The books are: - The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall - PG969 - Anne Bronte - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122349 - Almayer's Folly - PG720 - Joseph Conrad - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122348 - The Portrait Of A Lady - PG2833 & PG2834 - Henry James - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122346 - The History Of Henry Esmond - PG2511 - William Makepeace Thackeray - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122345 - The Belton Estate - PG4969 - Anthony Trollope - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=119515 - Ayala's Angel - PG33500 - Anthony Trollope - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122337 (I also have 3 other books I've worked on: - Persuasion - Jane Austen - The Forsyte Saga complete - John Galsworthy - The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas pere but I haven't added them to MobileRead because there are already versions of the books there.) Bob Gibbins

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Re: time after time
by Morasch＠aol.com 27 Feb '11

27 Feb '11

> i await your suggestions... more cowbell!

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Calibre: Open Source Software for Managing eBook Collections
by Michael S. Hart 27 Feb '11

27 Feb '11

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/calibre-revisited/30407 ". . .Calibre allows you to convert content from various internet sources such as Project Gutenberg into the appropriate format for your e-reader, whether it is a Kindle, a Nook, a Sony, or something else."

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Re: time after time
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Feb '11

27 Feb '11

"and the wheels on the bus go round and round..." sunday's version is up: > http://76.74.254.239/~bowerbird/a.fcgi .pdf code almost fully incorporated, _except_ for problems with short/blank pages at chapter-end. more generally, widows/orphans exist throughout. more improvements for the fixed-width of the ipad, but again here, other operational problems persist... i await your suggestions... *** by the end of this year, writers will be using a variety of book-creation tools -- web-based and offline -- which make it easy to spin out the main formats in use today... and everybody will shake their heads and wonder why in the world you people here thought it was so difficult. i guess you will drag out the t.e.i. manual to show them. -bowerbird

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Re: time after time
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Feb '11

27 Feb '11

saturday's version is up: > http://76.74.254.239/~bowerbird/a.fcgi changes made to accommodate the ipad's fixed-size viewport. more work needs to be done in that regard, but the changes should solve the resize-window-to-refresh display problems that've been observed in the web-browser version up to now. *** michael said: > we will not anoint any author of any markup language > as "King" at the expense of all other efforts. well, gee, michael, that's what you've been saying all along... but _someone_ at p.g. -- maybe while you weren't looking? -- has recently blessed restructured-text as an accepted format. meanwhile, far as i can tell, other markup-language formats would still be kicked back as "unacceptable", exactly like r.s.t. woulda been "unacceptable" right up until a few months ago... so _something_ has changed... whether you like it or not... -bowerbird

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Re: time after time
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 26 Feb '11

26 Feb '11

more good news! i did some testing, and it appears that my web-app _can_ jump to an internal anchor when displaying an .html file... so jana will get her wish about that, for search functionality. i don't know if this is a recent twist from the compiler boys, or if i had my head up my ass all along, but whatever the case, i'm happy to make my collaborators happy. you can look for that development sometime next week... -bowerbird p.s. wha...? john, html is no "backwater". been under a rock? not heard about html5? xhtml is the entity being abandoned, because in spite of a bunch of attention, it was unworkable... even .epub is trying to catch up. (google for epub liza html5.)

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Re: time after time
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 25 Feb '11

25 Feb '11

hey, folks, new version up: > http://76.74.254.239/~bowerbird/ab.fcgi this is an update on the fill-a-pdf-file app, one which allows you to specify the filename. in addition, after its successful completion, it creates a handy-dandy link to open the .pdf in a new window, or (via right-click) download it. oh yeah, it also does a better job of formatting the book in the way that we would want it done, such as bookmarks, chapters on new pages, etc. still more to be done on that, but we''re cookin'. like i said, a couple days on this and it'll be done, and then a couple days each for .mobi and .epub, so by the end of next week, we'll be sitting pretty. -bowerbird

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zero credibility
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 25 Feb '11

25 Feb '11

if someone thinks i have "zero credibility", why would they continue reading my posts? i dunno. beats me. it's a mystery. once i concluded that people like marcello and david starner, lee passey, josh the hutch, and -- the one we love to hate -- jon noring had "zero credibility", because they had _bet_ it all against me in our little poker game, and they _lost_, i put them in my spam folder and let them rot there. i read 'em if they're quoted in an e-mail that comes from people i still read, but it's _amazing_ just how seldom that happens. or maybe it's not, since they had so rarely (if ever) uttered anything that actually needed to be heard. even the many rocks that they tried to throw at me fell harmlessly at my feet, and merely amused me, especially when i picked up each one of their rocks and threw it back, plunking them on their heads... so really, folks, don't bother trying to squabble. if you don't like what i say, just kill-file me and we will both be much happier people in the end. have i made myself clear? -bowerbird p.s. meanwhile, one more guy in my spam folder...

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Re: time after time
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 25 Feb '11

25 Feb '11

got a new iphone very recently (yay verizon!). i had waited two-and-a-half years to update, because i didn't want to renew an at&t contract. so, as you would suspect, my new phone is a lot faster than my old one was... (it was a plain 3g, not even a 3gs, so the speed difference was big.) so i'm now doing more things with the iphone than i had been doing before. including e-mail. (thus, this listserve.) and clicking on .pdf links. the .pdf viewer in the old iphone was very slow, which is why i'd never gotten into that habit, but with the new iphone, the process is not painful... so i opened some of the .pdfs i've been creating, and reminded myself that an 8-inch-high page is just a smidgen too big for the safari .pdf-app. so i'm gonna be reducing that default to 7 inches, or somewhere around that, depending on results. *** i also got an ipad. (the cheapest model available, since the newer version will be here pretty soon.) so i'll be playing around with that as well. these fixed-width units will soon be very popular. (that's an understatement, intended to be funny.) and they give new life to a fixed-pagesize format like .pdf, even though i wanted it dead years ago. as far as i can tell, if you can customize the .pdf to your specific preferences, it'll work very nicely on an iphone or an ipad, maybe better than .epub, since there's a lot in .epub you cannot customize when displayed in the default ibooks viewer-app. i'll know more after some experimentation. but if anyone has any experience themselves, i'd love to hear your thoughts and reactions... -bowerbird

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