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

Kindle Touch software update now with KF8
by James Adcock 21 Apr '12

21 Apr '12

Kindle Touch now has the long-awaited software update to KF8. Previously only Kindle Fire ran KF8. "KF8" is basically Amazon's encapsulated version of EPUB. One can take a Gutenberg EPUB file and run it through Kindlegen Version 2 or Kindle Previewer to create a KF8 file which will display with much more integrity to the HTML version than PG's MOBI version of a file. Or one can also take an HTML file and use the same techniques to convert it to a KF8 file. (The resulting file still identifies itself as being a .mobi file, and will also run on older Kindles, but on Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire it will display with much greater fidelity to the original HTML) These techniques are also important if you care what your PG submissions look like on a KF8 device. Kindle Touch Software Update Version 5.1.0 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_left_sib?ie=UTF8& nodeId=200790650

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a blade of grass cracks the sidewalk
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 20 Apr '12

20 Apr '12

spring has sprung, so on this day of grass, i guess i just can't hold this back any more. > http://zenmagiclove.com/aarp2.py voila. a dingus for zen markup language. supporters will love finally seeing a look. detractors will love the bugs i left in there, just for them, as easter eggs in the grass... -bowerbird

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App feedback (Fwd: Re: A book reader keeps your readers on Gutenberg site instead of driving them away!)
by Greg Newby 17 Apr '12

17 Apr '12

Here's an iPhone eBook reader app. Feedback welcome! Greg ----- Forwarded message from xfyang(a)msn.com ----- Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2012 15:33:05 -0700 From: xfyang(a)msn.com To: Greg Newby <gbnewby(a)pglaf.org> Subject: Re: A book reader keeps your readers on Gutenberg site instead of driving them away! Dr. Newby, Following your suggestion I have setup the following two ways for your site to link to my free iPhone app. The app is a universal web reader, you could also use it to read NYTimes or any other web site. (1) iPhone store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toilet-reader/id492689212 (2) Hismalaya-soft home page: http://www.himalaya-soft.com Could you please also take a quick look of the 1-minute Youtube video that shows how Your readers can 1-click to download a book, no need to determine which format to select; the downloaded book is marked with a bright yellow icon; You readers never leave your site while reading a book; your readers can go back and forth between your site and their reading with just ONE click. Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e60RjoIzUg0 Please let me know if there is any thing else I can help with. Thank you. Frank Young > Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2012 13:41:19 -0700 > From: gbnewby(a)pglaf.org > To: xfyang(a)msn.com > Subject: Re: A book reader keeps your readers on Gutenberg site instead of driving them away! > > Thanks for your note, Frank. This sounds super. Do you need > anything from Project Gutenberg? Once things are set up, we could > link to your page. > -- Greg > > On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 11:19:09AM -0700, xfyang(a)msn.com wrote: > > > > > > Dear Dr. Newby, > > > > A few months ago, I sought your permission to redistribute some Project Gutenberg books, I have instead created a generic iPhone book reader, entitled Toilet Reader, which tightly integrates with Gutenberg website as well as many other sites. The result is a book reader better than iBook or Kindle in many aspects for reading Gutenberg books. > > > > The key feature is its seamless integration with Project Gutenberg website. The integration helps keeping your readers on your site instead of driving them away to another book reader after a download. To see the app in action please watch this 5-min Youtube video. Some comparisons between Toilet Reader and ibook and Kindle are detailed in the attached file in .pdf formats. > > > > Toilet Reader is available free of charge in App Store. Please feel free to share this app with your readers who may benefit. > > > > My two kids and I all love books and reading, and the kids still prefer paper copy. But one of them suggested that my app should integrate with Gutenberg website to make it easier to explore books there. This app offers me a chance to give back to Project Gutenberg. > > > > > > If you wish to further integrate this app with your website please advise me. The investment in a building good app is costly but I am fortunate enough to be able to do this for fun, which gives me a sense of contributing in my limited life span. > > > > Respectfully, > > > > Frank Young > > Himalaya-Soft > > > > ----- End forwarded message -----

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Bhagavata Purana ready to submit?
by James Simmons 09 Apr '12

09 Apr '12

With all your help I managed to get my submission, *A Study Of The Bhagavata Purana Or Esoteric Hinduism* into pretty good shape. This is the latest: http://epubmaker.pglaf.org/cache/20120406103034/ The book is such a big and complex project that rather than just inflict the whole thing on some unfortunate white washer I'd like to get some comments from anyone willing to give it a quick look first. I expect that the way I handled family trees (and this book has many) will be controversial. If I get a consensus that the book doesn't suck (or if I don't get any feedback at all) I'll submit it. I would be especially interested in Bowerbird's opinion on this. No, really. Bowerbird gave me some good advice early on with this book, and while I did not take all of it it did lead me to try RST, which I am convinced saved me a ton of work. I like RST better than the ZML that he had originally suggested. My reason is that while ZML documents look like they aren't marked up at all, that is not necessarily an advantage. For instance, to make a heading in ZML it sounds like you have to insert some number of blank lines before the text. Counting blank lines is something I'd rather not deal with. RST lets you underline the heading with something and not worry about blank lines before or after. The RST converter deals with that. I also learned that you don't re-wrap your text before proofing. You let the converter deal with re-wrapping. Next time I'll know better. Thanks, James Simmons

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Kindlegen 2.4 has some useful features
by James Adcock 08 Apr '12

08 Apr '12

Kindlegen 2.4 is announced, which has some useful features, such as properly supporting display:none -- which could be useful for example in some of the commonly used DP hacks which are intended (currently unsuccessfully) to hide page numbers on those devices which really don't want to support page numbers. I think PG is still running Kindlegen first generation, however. http://tinyurl.com/6qhkzx3

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RST search failed
by traverso＠posso.dm.unipi.it 08 Apr '12

08 Apr '12

Searching the PG catalogue (advanced search) for filetype = rst I get New Search You selected: * Filetype = rst (183 books match) 183 books found. but none is listed. Carlo

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Possible bug in epubmaker
by James Simmons 07 Apr '12

07 Apr '12

One of the things I did with my RST file was to include a cover image, like this: .. meta:: :PG.Id: 9999 :PG.Title: A Study of the Bhagavata Purana :PG.Rights: Public Domain :PG.Producer: Bhakta Jim :PG.Credits: This file was produced from page images at the Internet Archive. :DC.Creator: Purnendu Narayana Sinha :DC.Title: A Study of the Bhagavata Purana or Esoteric Hinduism :DC.Language: en :DC.Created: 1901 :coverpage: images/bhagap_cover.png There really is a bhagap_cover.png file in my images directory. However, the file does not get included in the EPUB archive. I do not refer to this file anywhere in the HTML. I definitely include it in the zip file I upload. James Simmons

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epubmaker support forum
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 07 Apr '12

07 Apr '12

seems like there is need for an epubmaker support forum. and while, on one level, gutvol-d might be the right place, anyone who's paying any bit of attention at all knows that pg-rst and epubmaker are failing -- failing _big-time_ -- to win hearts and minds over at distributed proofreaders... indeed, they're steadily losing the few supporters they had. (if you need proof, just read the posts from the past week.) so if you want to shore this thing up before it sinks entirely, better get someone over there pronto to do some repair work. otherwise, james might end up being your only .rst submitter. -bowerbird p.s. yet another observation that you could've made yourselves, if you merely took your heads out of the sand. you're welcome...

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Re: [gutvol-d] Bhagavata Purana ready to submit?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 06 Apr '12

06 Apr '12

james said: > I would be especially interested > in Bowerbird's opinion on this. i expect you will make some edits in the next few days, so i'll get to it sometime next week, when it has settled down. *** > I like RST better than the ZML that he had originally suggested. it's all light-markup. that's the main decision-point involved. > My reason is that while ZML documents > look like they aren't marked up at all, > that is not necessarily an advantage. that can be debated. but i'm not really interested in doing so. > For instance, to make a heading in ZML > it sounds like you have to insert > some number of blank lines before the text. correct. 4 blank lines before. and 2 blank lines after. 1 blank line between heading and subheading, if any. this will sound very familiar to anyone who knows the p.g. standard text format, as it is exactly the same... > Counting blank lines is something I'd rather not deal with. i can understand that. except i don't find myself doing much "counting". the computer's pretty good at doing that, so i just let the computer do the counting for me... then it displays the table of contents, and i just check to make sure it looks right -- that all of the headers at a specific level (there's often just one) line up nice and straight and purty, just like they're supposed to. and if one of them is wrong, it sticks out like a sore thumb, so i see it, and know it's wrong, and i go and fix it, pronto... one of my test-suite books has headers that are 6 levels deep, and i routinely handle that file without having any problems... > RST lets you underline the heading with something > and not worry about blank lines before or after. you could easily create a macro that would toggle between the blank-lines headers and a more-explicit type of markup. > ...switch to implicit... > change '\n[h1] ' to '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' > change '\n[h2] ' to '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' > change '\n[h3] ' to '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' > change '\n[h4] ' to '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' > change '\n[h5] ' to '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' > change '\n[h6] ' to '\n\n\n\n\n ' > ...switch to explicit... > change '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' to '\n[1] ' > change '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' to '\n[2] ' > change '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' to '\n[3] ' > change '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' to '\n[4] ' > change '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ' to '\n[5] ' > change '\n\n\n\n\n ' to '\n[6] ' *** my authoring-tools show formatted output _while_ you edit, so there's no need to "guess" how something is gonna look... -bowerbird

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Problems in RST with numbered lists.
by James Simmons 06 Apr '12

06 Apr '12

OK, I'm making some progress with RST but I'm still stuck on numbered lists. I don't *want* numbered lists. My original text has paragraphs that begin with numbers (both Arabic and Roman) and I just want these to be formatted as paragraphs or block quotes with no <li> and <ol> tags. When RST puts these in the lists are not in a nice vertical column but indent and outdent at odd points. So again I don't want numbered lists here. I just want my paragraphs left alone even when they are numbered. Thoughts? James Simmons

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