- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: Print-on-demand and dead-tree copies of Gutenberg texts.
by grendelkhan 17 Jun '05

17 Jun '05

Thanks to everyone for their comments so far! I'm learning quite a bit as I go. As of October 2003, the US Commerce department reported that about three-fifths of households had a computer; a little over half had internet access. https://www.esa.doc.gov/Reports/NationOnlineBroadband04.htm So it's not as bad as I was led to believe. Still, Perhaps I should have stated my goals a little more clearly. I have no particular interest in making money or making a business out of this. I'd simply like to make the books available---through whatever means that may be---in dead-tree form. I suppose it's a terrible idea fo tie the actual Project to a commercial entity by developing a working relationship with them---I don't think an "Official Project Gutenberg Edition" is a good idea. lulu.com, as mentioned, has no setup fees, but their pricing is a mite stiff---$4.53 plus $0.02/page. Certainly better than buying stuff from most university presses, but not exactly bargain-basement. Lightning Source charges (based on some quick googling at http://com1.runboard.com/bthescribesmessageboard.fwritingarchives.t45%7Coff… ), $0.90 plus $0.013 per page, but I don't know what kind of binding that requires, or what sort of setup fees they charge. Perhaps they'd waive them if DP put out some sort of print-ready version in addition to human-readable text. I'm thinking TeX->PDF here, as it's pretty much the stablest human-readable-yet-fully-marked-up format available. Thoughts? I suppose I should take a relatively short etext, mark it up and see how it looks. I concur that simply throwing plain text, or even decent HTML, at paper is a horrible idea. So, what I ask is---is there a way to prepare the etexts as, in addition to HTML, whatever format is print-ready for these machines? Since typesetting a ready copy is a simple matter of feeding it to a Xerox DocuTech or whatever the $100,000 piece of hardware the print shop uses is, how can we do the necessary preprocessing ourselves? What exactly does the "setup fee" include? Thanks to everyone again for being so helpful with this. --grendelkhan

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re: [gutvol-d] roundtripping formatted text through a .pdf
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 Jun '05

17 Jun '05

jon gorman said: > I think bowerbird just claimed the pdf that he exported > was easy to import back as pdf (via copying out the text), > not necessarily that he converted an existing pdf file. > Of course, I'm probably wrong about that. > Without capitols I sometimes get lost ;) i understand... :+) and what you've said is pretty-much correct. yes, i'm _only_ talking about .pdfs that _my_ viewer-app creates. (if some other program created the .pdf, then blame that program.) so, you put plain-text into my viewer, and it formats it nicely. you can print that nice formatting to a .pdf (which looks nice). and then you can copy the text out of the .pdf. when you do that, much of the nice formatting has been stripped away, of course, and we're back to plain-text again. (if i remember correctly, .pdf _does_ retain italicizing, but it _doesn't_ retain bolding. i don't have the faintest idea why, it's kinda weird like that. and it definitely stores the color of the text, which is cute. but it definitely strips the _size_ of the text, which is bad. all of this is in _my_ version of acrobat reader, which is v4. we talk about acrobat/.pdf like it's one straightforward thing, but it's a crazy mish-mash of different-and-changing versions, so all of our discussion needs to be couched in careful clauses.) but the loss of formatting doesn't matter, because after you have made a few global changes (which, among other things, restore the blank lines between paragraphs that get stripped), you can put the text back into my viewer-program, and it will redo the nice formatting, just like it did it in the first place... with zen markup, this is all pretty easy to accomplish... :+) > If I had time, I'd write one by hand for ya > that had none of the encoding mess. i'd love to see that! -bowerbird

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roundtripping formatted text through a .pdf
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 Jun '05

17 Jun '05

recently i've worked on "roundtripping" styled z.m.l. text through a .pdf. my viewer-program can write z.m.l. text to a .pdf such that copying the text out of the .pdf gives a user the same text that went in. make a few global changes -- which restores the whitespace acrobat usually strips from text -- and you can load the text back into my z.m.l. viewer-program and generate the same .pdf once again... the proof is in the pudding, and the structure is in the presentation. that is _not_ something you can do with text that's copied out of a .pdf created with other programs i know. generally, the .pdf format is known as the "roach motel" of file-formats -- content goes in and can't get out... :+) -bowerbird

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Print-on-demand and dead-tree copies of Gutenberg texts.
by grendelkhan 17 Jun '05

17 Jun '05

I was having a discussion with my father, and I thought I would bring it up on the mailing list, as it seems to be the place for it. We'd just come out of our local Wal-Mart, and I'd noticed the out-of-copyright books (classics and such) being sold for $6 to $11 each. I commented that folks could just download the books for free if they wanted to read them, but he asked how many people owned a computer, and how many of those had heard of Project Gutenberg? So I did a bit of researching, and discovered that there exist "print on demand" publishers, which instead of doing the offset-printing runs of thousands and thousands of books, will, once a book has been prepared and typeset, sometimes keep none at all in stock, and print them only when ordered. It seems that it would be a good idea to come up with some way to offer the majority of PG's catalog through some method of print-on-demand publishing, selling at-cost. Many Gutenberg works are obscure, and not of general enough interest to warrant a print run from a traditional publisher. I'm aware that I could clearly run off and do this myself, but (a) I wanted to get some feedback from the community at large, and (b) print-on-demand publishing still requires start-up costs, and a per-book "setup" fee of some kind, above and beyond the per-copy materials cost. Given that PG has the Distributed Proofreaders to provide lots and lots of work on worthy projects, and given that PGLAF is a charitable organization which lots of people love, is there some way to get around that issue? Would it be worth it to provide a source of dead-tree editions of many of the archive's works? Thoughts? Objections? Pointers to some guy who's been doing this for the last ten years that I failed to Google up? --grendelkhan

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re: [gutvol-d] roundtripping formatted text through a .pdf
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Jun '05

16 Jun '05

david said: > But back to the Bowerbird case... i was wondering when we were gonna stop wasting time talking about frivolous topics like .pdf and usability, and get back to the most important topic of all -- me! so thanks for getting us back on-point, david... ;+) > he contends that his Z.M.L. tool > written in gwbasic (or whatever its using these days) realbasic. http://www.realsoftware.com it runs on mac (classic and o.s.x.) and windows (95 and up) and even some flavors of linux. likewise, it creates programs that run on all those platforms as well... and just this week, they announced a new version -- rb2005, which is written in realbasic, so it is a wonderful example of eating your own pudding -- and they are making the entry-level linux version free (as in free beer). i take it you're one of those language snobs who wouldn't even consider basic, but if i'm wrong, you should take a good look at it. lots of power in it, and cross-plat that really works. i have no linux experience, so i haven't compiled my viewer-program out to linux yet, but if you want to be my guinea-pig, i mean "alpha-tester", let me know. > can do everything including make coffee i don't drink coffee, so there are no plans in that regard. > walk the dog we have a cat. she walks herself. and given my gut, i should take my own walks. so again, no plans. i _do_ eat, however. and i like toasted-cheese sandwiches. so i _do_ have plans to put a routine in my viewer-program that will make a toasted-cheese sandwich. you'll be able to specify the type of bread, how light/dark you want it toasted, and any amount of several different types of cheeses, so i am quite excited about this. i just wish i knew how to program it. perhaps i'll start an open-source effort. got any advice for me? > and oh yeah, convert pdfs to a pleasant-to-read format. no, that's not really my objective. yes, the .pdfs that my program creates _are_ pleasant-to-read, because they're just a .pdf version of what my viewer displays... but the "roundtripping" goal is that when my program makes a .pdf, the end-user can copy the text out of it, make a few global changes, and then stick it right back into my viewer and it will look the same. create another .pdf from that and it'll look identical to the first .pdf; and you can again copy the text out of that, make the global changes, and then stick it right back into my viewer and it will look the same. no fuss, no muss, no reapplication of markup, just roundtrip usage... > If this is true, this would be the first tool out of literally dozens > that I've tried to accomplish this feat successfully. actually, getting the exact same text out that you put in is not all _that_ remarkable. or _shouldn't_ be, anyway. but yeah, i know of no other tool that can do it either... > But I'm not going to go install DOS and gwbasic to find out. you silly boy. i moved out of dos well over a decade ago. and gwbasic was always quite inferior compared to qbasic. (although, as a command-line processor, dos was a _very_ friendly interface for a power-user like myself. my word, i had .bat files that would interactively create .bat files! two-letter .bat files give you 500+ quickly-run commands. i tell ya, there were many times my efficiency could _fly_. compared to that, a graphical-user-interface is molasses. but hey, it's all about selling units to the masses, right?) anyway, david, wanna alpha-test? or would you prefer to wait for the toasted-cheese sandwich feature? -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] roundtripping formatted text through a .pdf
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Jun '05

16 Jun '05

jon gorman said: > Just wanted to clarify things. that's good. i like clarification... :+) > I'm skeptical about bowerbird's claims as well that's good. i like skeptics... ;+) but the proof is in the pudding, jon, the proof is in the pudding... > but it's misleading to say that > Acrobat doesn't store text in the document. i believe, like you, that that would be a misleading statement. > It is possible to make the text rather obscure well, as i said, one _can_ make it rather totally "obscure" by converting it to graphic format before writing it to the .pdf. in that case, the user cannot copy out the text -- as text -- to the clipboard. such "text" is not found by "find" either. (here i'm largely speaking, of course, as a _programmer_ who is actually outputting the content to the .pdf driver. most people creating a .pdf don't have that luxury, in that they're stuck with whatever their authoring tool might do. as a sidebar here, i will note that the problems involved in copying text from a .pdf are well-known and long-standing, so they _should_ have been addressed by the programmers of common authoring tools, like word-processors, by this time. in programming my tool, i have sought to empower my users, including in this arena of round-tripping text put into a .pdf.) > but that doesn't mean that if formatted correctly > you could not scan through the file in a text editor and > read it. Granted, it's rarely done, but doesn't mean > it's impossible. well, i believe your statement is misleading as well, jon... (and if you're striving to "clarify" things, you really should try something to see if you _can_ do it before you _say_ you can...) load a .pdf into an editor; you won't find much (if any) text qua text, not in a recognizable form you can easily copy out to the clipboard. (it's not _impossible_ you will find some text, depending upon how the .pdf was created, since there is text in some .ps files. but it's never a long unbroken stretch before it is interrupted by postscript commands, so this approach is doomed to failure.) so one shouldn't expect to find text -- stored as text -- in a .pdf, not in the traditional sense. (however, see the p.s. on this post.) nonetheless, if the text wasn't stored in the .pdf in _some_ way, users wouldn't be able to copy it out to the clipboard, would they? and acrobat wouldn't be able to do "find" operations on it, would it? (notably, though, you'll discover that acrobat's "find" capabilities don't extend to whitespace. for instance, you can't do a search for two spaces, even if there were such instances in the original file.) -bowerbird p.s. it might be possible to store text in the comments of a .pdf, i'm not sure. if you could, then that _might_ be interesting to do. (i will explore the possibility, especially when my app starts to create .pdfs directly without running them through a .pdf driver.) with such storage, one wouldn't need to pull the .pdf into acrobat in order to retrieve the text from it, which might be a capability that some people would find useful. (it would also allow ordinary search programs to search the .pdf.) but that's just gravy to me; as long as users can "roundtrip" text out of a .pdf, my goal is met. once people get used to my viewer, they won't even _want_ .pdfs.

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re: [gutvol-d] roundtripping formatted text through a .pdf
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Jun '05

16 Jun '05

david said: > Acrobat doesn't store text in PDFs, they store pixels and > vectors and OCR'd coordinates. Most-definately not text. you must be making some kind of semantic argument that i don't grasp. because i can copy out my text just peachy. and most people can copy text out of many .pdfs just fine. it typically loses a good deal of its formatting, and it is not unusual for chunks of it to be ordered "out of place", and the users' ability to copy out text _can_ be disabled, or subverted in other ways (i.e., by converting text to an image format before writing it to the .pdf originally) but the experience of copying text from a .pdf is common. however, if you'd like to explain the point you're making, whether it is semantic or otherwise, do please feel free. :+) it probably won't matter much to me, but i don't mind keeping my brain exercised by doing a little thinking... -bowerbird

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is that 60 gigs in your pocket?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Jun '05

16 Jun '05

it's a photo-ipod in my pocket, but yes, i am glad to see you... -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] Re: Print-on-demand and dead-tree copies of Gutenberg texts.
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Jun '05

15 Jun '05

grendelkhan said: > Perhaps I should have stated my goals a little more clearly. > I have no particular interest in making money > or making a business out of this. but it costs money to do it. so you have to "make a business out of it" in order to do it in the first place... unless you have a lot of money to throw down the toilet. and you don't have to worry about "making money", because unless some big miracle strikes, or you are particularly clever about how you go about it, you won't make any money. you're far more likely to lose your shirt. so "avoiding the loss of money" is your real objective here. if you can't afford to lose any money, you should stay away. > I'd simply like to make the books available > ---through whatever means that may be--- > in dead-tree form. right. but you can't just wave a wand and make it happen. > lulu.com, as mentioned, has no setup fees, > but their pricing is a mite stiff---$4.53 plus $0.02/page. that $4.53 _is_ a setup fee, whether they call it that or not. and since it's $4.53 _per_ book, it's a rather high one at that. (if you really want the best p.o.d. price, i'll dig that up for you. there's one site offering quotes based on several p.o.d. places.) > I'm thinking TeX->PDF here ok, but who puts all the e-texts into tex format? that's a real cost, a very real cost, and it's huge. > Thoughts? I suppose I should take a relatively short etext, > mark it up and see how it looks. why a "relatively short" one? that'll just lead you to underestimate the actual cost, which is the best way to lose money fast. mark up one of average size and difficulty, and then multiply it by about 11,000, and then you'll have a good idea of the true cost. > So, what I ask is---is there a way to > prepare the etexts as, in addition to HTML, > whatever format is print-ready for these machines? there will be, very shortly, yes -- my viewer-program. given some minor editing of an e-text for consistency, usually 5-10 minutes for most e-texts, it will format the book according to the user's specifications (as to font, size, leading, colors, and paper-size, which dave mentioned in regard to european users) and create a .pdf. putting this program into the hands of end-users, so they can create their own output, to their own specs, and print it out on their own machines, is one route to giving them hard-copy versions of all the e-texts. it's not the only route, but since it puts all the power and all the _costs_ on their shoulders, it is likely to be the one that gets implemented more than others... -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] Print-on-demand and dead-tree copies of Gutenberg texts.
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 Jun '05

14 Jun '05

grendelkhan said: > Would it be worth it to provide > a source of dead-tree editions of > many of the archive's works? "worth it" to whom? :+) > Thoughts? it's a nice thought, to be sure. one that many people have had. but not an easy one to implement. > Objections? it's very smart of you to ask. so i will tell you some pitfalls. i tell you this not to dissuade you, so if you think you can make it work anyway, just go right ahead and do it. but know that these are some issues... the start-up costs are very real, so you won't get a p.o.d.-printer to waive them, even for a charity. and printed in runs of a few copies, the books still are fairly expensive. plus the shipping costs will eat you up. in addition, if you just ran the books off as they are -- as plain old ascii text -- people would largely turn their noses up. there is a certain minimum standard that we have come to expect from "a book", and failure to meet that is a recipe for failure. even the .html versions of the books won't create a p-version that would be acceptable. so you'd have to invest time/money/energy in some desktop-publishing capabilities... even after all that, in today's marketplace, simply creating a product won't do very much. today's customers are subjected to such heavy marketing that they simply won't move at all unless you bombard 'em with more of the same. that means you'd have to do hype and marketing, and probably pay for shelf-space in bookstores. and by then, you've just become another publisher... but you'd still lose out to the publishing houses, because their versions would have slicker covers. finally, if you ever _did_ make it work, by some miracle or other, you should then expect to receive vicious _flak_ from people who will _resent_ you, because you're "getting rich" off their volunteer labor and "selling something that should be given away free". so unless you have a _very_ thick skin... > Pointers to some guy who's been doing this > for the last ten years that I failed to Google up? nobody has been doing it, for the reasons i listed. that doesn't mean that nobody _will_ be doing it, however. if you're really serious about the idea, see where daniel moynihan is working these days... at blackmask.com, he demonstrated clearly that a plain-text master-file can take you a long way. he hasn't said so directly, but reading in between the pages, i'm guessing he's going even farther now. ;+) -bowerbird

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