March 2012 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

print-on-demand as a gift to say "thank you"
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 05 Mar '12

05 Mar '12

james said: > In addition to telling you > everything you ever wanted to know about e-books well, james, that's probably not true... :+) > including how to create them and that's probably not true either... ;+) > this is a really attractive book with many illustrations but that part is true, at least about the illustrations... and you've priced the book at a mere $7.50, so you can't be making much at that price -- if anything! -- so i sprang for the $11.09 (that's 2-week shipping), so i could have my own hard-copy. i like to compare a physical book with its digitized copies, so i can see what (if anything) was lost in the digitization process and what (if anything) was gained. it is illuminating... given this low cost, even for a book filled with pictures, i'd think the time might have arrived where p.g. could print-on-demand a book from each e-text and send it to the producer, as a hard-copy gift to say "thank you!" this would be especially poetic for those producers who purchased the book so they could scan it destructively... -bowerbird

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rst2all?
by James Simmons 05 Mar '12

05 Mar '12

I'm thinking about using RST for my next PG submission. The thing is, I want to process the RST file for myself before submitting it, to be certain that I did everything OK. I see the following article: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:RST_tools_for_the_WWers which seems to point me in the right direction except it does not tell me where to get the rst2all utility. Googling rst2all gives me nothing. So how do I get this utility? James Simmons

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Remastered PG epubs - crediting/branding
by Robert Gibbins 04 Mar '12

04 Mar '12

Over the last year or two, I have remastered (as I call it) about 50 PG books in ePub format. In most cases I haven't changed the actual text of the books , other than to correct the odd transcription error if I can find a paper or scanned edition of the book to refer to. So as far as I am concerned these are really PG books in a slightly different format from the ones in the PG repository. About a year ago I added a few of these books to the MobileRead website, and am thinking of gradually adding the others, once I have proof-read them for quality. However I observe that many of the books on the Mobile Read website, although clearly derived originally from Gutenberg sources, do not have any Gutenberg branding, credits, copyright, license, etc. I should like at minimum to preserve the audit trail/ provenance of where the books came from (and also credit the people who did at least much of the work). My preference would be to keep all the Gutenberg branding, merely adding an extra provenance line crediting myself with remastering the epub (and in a few cases detailing other changes I have made) However strictly speaking these are no longer quite the PG originals, so my question is can I do this, or does the PG license prohibit it? Putting the question a different way, how much of the Gutenberg wrappings do I have to delete to be 'legal'? Note: All of these books are stated in their front matter to be out of copyright in the USA, and I believe this is also the case in the UK, where I live, and in Canada where MobileRead is located. There is also no question of wanting to charge for the books. Bob Gibbins

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For those seeking markup challenges...
by Greg Newby 04 Mar '12

04 Mar '12

The Integration of Functions of a Single Variable by G. H. Hardy http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38993 Lotta math. Beautifully done. Dunno if there's an effective path to EPUB or even HTML. -- Greg

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E-Book Enlightenment: Reading And Leading With One Laptop Per Child [Paperback] is on Amazon.com
by James Simmons 03 Mar '12

03 Mar '12

E-Book Enlightenment: Reading And Leading With One Laptop Per Child [Paperback] is now on Amazon.com, again only the U.S. site. Outside the U.S. you should be able to order directly from Create Space. Eventually Amazon will have *Search Inside The Book* working for this title and you'll be able to appreciate all the great artwork done by Oceana Rain Fields. This art did not survive translation to Kindle format. It looked terrible there, so I had to remove it. Even in B/W it really adds something to this printed edition. If the idea of having a really attractive printed book that explains everything about e-books, including how to make them, seems odd to you then you really should read the book! The URL is: http://www.amazon.com/E-Book-Enlightenment-Reading-Leading-Laptop/dp/147012… James Simmons

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E-Book Enlightenment now in paperback!
by James Simmons 02 Mar '12

02 Mar '12

The book "E-Book Enlightenment: Reading And Leading With One Laptop Per Child" is available as a Crown Quarto sized paperback from CreateSpace: https://www.createspace.com/3807206 In addition to telling you everything you ever wanted to know about e-books, including how to create them, this is a really attractive book with many illustrations including original art by the talented Oceana Rain Fields. James Simmons

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Marking up poetry in (x)html
by Robert Gibbins 01 Mar '12

01 Mar '12

Jim Adcock wrote on Fri Feb 17 (somewhat precised by me): >... the common PG/DP approach which I think is being generated by guiguts is not bad: >... >... <style type="text/css"> >... .poem span.i0 {display: block; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} >... .poem span.i2 {display: block; margin-left: 1em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} >... .poem span.i4 {display: block; margin-left: 2em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} >... </style> >... >... <div class="poem"> >... <div class="stanza"> >... <span class="i0">There was a young man of St. Kitts,<br /></span> >... <span class="i0">Who was very much troubled with fits;<br /></span> >... <span class="i2"> The eclipse of the moon<br /></span> >... <span class="i2"> Threw him into a swoon;<br /></span> >... <span class="i0">Where he tumbed and broke into bits.<br /></span> >... </div> >... </div> The abstraction of a "line" which would ideally be displayed on one line of a small device, but with extra wrap-indent when it cannot, seems extremely useful (for those machines on which it works). A couple of questions though: 1. Is there an obvious reason not to use: div.i0 {margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}, etc and <div class="i0">There was a young man...</div>, etc? Somehow using a tag which is inherently a block seems more simple and obvious than using a span with {display: block;} 2. Is there an unstated reason/convention for describing an indent of 1em as class=i2, 2em as class=i4, etc? This is not a trick question, I ask from curiosity/ignorance. Bob Gibbins

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Marking up poetry in (x)html
by Robert Gibbins 01 Mar '12

01 Mar '12

There have been one or two appends over the last month or two which have mentioned the difficulty of marking up poetry in html. Trawling through the web this afternoon I came across: http://gtwebdev.com/workshop/misc/verse.php Which also refers to: http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Blocks_and_Paragraphs/2.3.4/ To summarise, these seem to me to imply that there is an 'architected' way using CSS to mark up verse so that it is centred in the page, set flush left and ragged right (which I take to be what is required) namely to use a block whose CSS style is: {display: table; margin: 0 auto;} but please read the actual references for more erudite details. To take an example from PG3496 - Jack Tier by James Fenimore Cooper, which I have been converting to epub, there is a quotation at the head of chapter 4 which I originally marked up as follows: <blockquote class="margins-inset"> <p class="no-indent"> "Leander dived for love. Leucadia's cliff<br/> The Lesbian Sappho leap'd from in a miff,<br/> To punish Phaon; Icarus went dead,<br/> Because the wax did not continue stiff;<br/> And, had he minded what his father said,<br/> He had not given a name unto his watery bed."</p> <p class="justify-right small-caps">Sands.</p> </blockquote> Where the stylesheet contains: blockquote.margins-inset { font-size: 90%; margin-left: 3em; margin-right: 3em; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em} This displays a poem left-justified to the left margin at 3em. Following the advice in the references I then changed this to: <blockquote class="margins-inset"> <p class="no-indent verse">"Leander dived for love. Leucadia's cliff<br/> The Lesbian Sappho leap'd from in a miff,<br/> To punish Phaon; Icarus went dead,<br/> Because the wax did not continue stiff;<br/> And, had he minded what his father said,<br/> He had not given a name unto his watery bed."</p> <p class="justify-right small-caps">Sands.</p> </blockquote> Where the style sheet now contains in addition: p.verse { display: table; margin: 0 auto} Displaying this changed version with IE9 makes the verse left-justified, but with the longest line centred, as the references imply. This doesn't work in any of my Sony Readers, but neither does it work any worse than the previous version, so I am thinking that as a way to mark up poetry in a device-independent way (works best on a full-spec browser, but still looks acceptable on an e-reader) so that one XHTML master file could be used to produce both HTML and epubs, it might be quite useful. Can anybody see anything wrong with this? Would either of these versions look right on a kindle? Bob Gibbins

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