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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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i'm on vacation this week
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 29 Feb '12

29 Feb '12

i said: > welcome to friday, february 29th, 2012... :+) well, obviously, i copied that from the 2008 post, and changed the year, but forgot to do the day of the week. but i'm on vacation, so as i look out the window, over the pool, and the jacuzzi, and out at the lovely pacific ocean, as the train goes by one way, and the pelicans the other, every single day this week seems like it could be a friday... and i'm waiting for my sweetheart to ask me to marry her. -bowerbird p.s. after all, i asked her eighty-nine thousand times!

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it's sadie hawkins day, 2012
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 29 Feb '12

29 Feb '12

welcome to friday, february 29th, 2012... :+) in light of the merry-go-round, today here i repeat the post which i made exactly four years ago today. for the 2012 update, see the end of the post... *** the 2008 post... welcome to friday, february 29th, a day/date which occurs -- on average -- only once every 28 years... if it's your birthday today, let me wish you a happy one... over the course of 28 years, of course, things can change. heck, over the course of a dozen years, things can change. and when those years are _internet_years_ -- which are akin to 1=7 dog-years -- those changes can be remarkable indeed. that's what i thought when i read this post in a d.p. forum today: > http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=430803#430803 juliet said: > Very originally, before I arrived at the site, > proofers dowloaded a tool to their computers that > then worked with the site to provide the proofing interface. > They quickly learned that trying to make the tool work > (and then keeping it current) on all different operating systems > and computers was a nightmare and abandoned that approach. sometimes things that you "quickly learned" a long time ago are no longer applicable today. this is one of those things... desktop apps of the type juliet describes are common today. basically, to do the proofing job, the tool would download (1) the page-scan, and (2) the text. on the flipside, the tool needs to be able to upload (3) the corrected text. that's all... none of these 3 things is difficult. indeed, they are all trivial. they are done in r.s.s. readers, blogging software, and so on. this means the "lesson" d.p. "learned" about the "nightmare" of this approach isn't applicable now. it's totally out-of-date. it's simple -- even for an ordinary programmer like myself -- to create such a program. it would be cross-plat, and work, dependably, and it would not be difficult at all to maintain... the web is no longer in a state of flux. it has become stable. (and, truth be told, it was probably also possible to do this even way back, if the d.p. programmers had had the chops; but without having more details, i cannot say that for sure.) so, does that mean that d.p. should now use this approach? not necessarily. what they have seems to work well enough. at least for them. i wouldn't be happy with it (because the desktop approach has benefits), but if they are, that's fine... still, it's just silly -- and wrong -- to say that you _couldn't_ do it the other way, that it's a "nightmare" you'd "abandon"... -bowerbird p.s. thanks for all the black history books done this month... *** now for the 2012 update... in 2008, it wasn't surprising that d.p. didn't believe it was necessary to have an offline app to interact with their site. as i said then, it was understandable, and even acceptable. in 2012, however, when they still don't believe they have any need for such an app -- let alone _have_it_ already -- it is surprising, and more than a little disappointing too... it's also disappointing, to some degree, that they do not have an app that lets people proof using a smart-phone. and it's downright shocking that many people report that they can't even interact with the d.p. site with their ipad! that's a big-enough screen that it certainly _should_ work. so at this point, d.p. is definitely doing something wrong. but that will not be a surprise to anyone paying attention. -bowerbird p.s. my posts earlier in the month are interesting too. there's one on the 28th, in response to the d.p. test of "perpetual" proofing, where people were still finding (and missing!) errors even in a fifth round of proofing, with the p3 proofers doing no better than the p1 ones. (each side missed as many errors, just different ones.) and another message, on the 24th, where i explained how y'all botched the page-number/naming convention. as this evidence clearly shows, you've learned very little in the last 4 years, and i expect the next 4 are no better. but the lack of progress really becomes quite noticeable once you get out the calendars are track things directly.

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Re: [gutvol-d] Recording the quality of a book's OCR
by Lee Passey 29 Feb '12

29 Feb '12

On 1/3/2012 12:52 PM, Lee Passey wrote: > On Tue, January 3, 2012 11:46 am, Edward Betts wrote: > >> I agree we need a way to correct our books. I find it difficult to >> read the ePub or Kindle versions of scanned books because of the >> OCR errors. I'm sure the OCR errors are irritating when using >> text-to-speech. > > As a first step to move this process along I have created a servlet > which parses the Abbyy output file and converts it to HTML. [snip] > My next step will be to allow the document to be gzipped before > downloading. After that, I will add an option to break the HTML file > into multiple files, each of which matches a single page image, and > return the collection as a zip archive. This step is now complete. Additionally, there is now an option to omit (or include, depending on your perspective) word coordinates. > To use this service, in a browser navigate to > "http://www.ebookcoop.net/ebookcoop/FromIA?[iaid]", where [iaid] is > the Internet Archive IDentifer for a specific work. By default, Abbyy output is returned as a single HTML file without word coordinates. To add coordinates add "&coords" to the query string; e.g. "http://www.ebookcoop.net/ebookcoop/FromIA?cu31924097556546&coords". To return the file as a gzipped HTML file add "&gzip" to the query string. To return the file as a zip archive of HTML files where each file represents a single page (and should have the same naming convention as the image files) add "&zip" to the query string. Note that "&zip" and "&gzip" are incompatible, with "&zip" taking precedence; if you use both options, "&gzip" will be ignored. If you were building an online editing tool you would probably want to use a query string like this: "http://www.ebookcoop.net/ebookcoop/FromIA?tarzanofapes00burruoft&coords&zip" Again, let me remind you that this service is running on an old Pentium /// in my basement at the end of a DSL line, so expect it to be quite slow (it could require a matter of minutes to construct the file). As always, feedback is encouraged. Cheers, Lee

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Re: [gutvol-d] rewrapping p.g. to an existing scan-set
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Feb '12

28 Feb '12

jim said: > http://freekindlebooks.org/Dev/PNP.txt ok, that looks pretty good, at first glance. :+) i'm curious if you can also restore the end-line hyphenates. it's alright if you can't, but if you can, i'd like to see that too. of course, depending on what you'll wanna use this for, you might not even want the end-line hyphenates to be restored. for instance, to re-do this book at distributed proofreaders -- which, face it, greg, will be your "crowdsourcing" solution, because why should anyone re-invent that particular wheel? -- you don't need the end-line hyphenates; d.p doesn't use 'em. but for some purposes, they will be important. for instance, my intention would be to mount the text with the original scan-set, for easy comparison by the public, so for that kind of project, the end-line hyphenates are needed. *** still waiting for carlo to demonstrate his output... or document his procedure. or _anything_, really. *** i've written programs to do this job a half-dozen times, each one with a slightly different approach, so i believe i have enough strategies now to do the task thoroughly, i just need to assemble the pieces in the correct order... it's also the case that i'll compare the archive.org text with the p.g. text, to create a superior end-result, so i'm willing to take some time to pre-clean them both -- most especially the archive.org version-- meaning that it will be simpler to write the synthesizing code... still, i'd like as much of it as possible to be automatic. so i'll post my output as soon as carlo posts his, but i'm also going to continue to work on this objective... > Try: > http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/28948/pg28948.txt > vs. > http://www.archive.org/details/therainbowlawren00lawrrich great. i'll tackle that next. unless you know that it's a significantly different version. i'm only interested in scan-sets that are a match for the particular text-file. if they're too dissimilar, a comparison isn't worthwhile. -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] rewrapping p.g. to an existing scan-set
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Feb '12

27 Feb '12

andrew said: > So don't expect it to match > any particulat print edition. which is why the world will eventually reject it, as an unnecessary appendage, just as soon as it has a solid digital text that proves it does match a print edition. the question is whether that solid text will come from p.g., or from elsewhere. the answer, cumulated over many books, will determine if p.g. has any future, or is rejected as an unnecessary appendage. -bowerbird

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poetry markup merry-go-round, 1 year ago
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Feb '12

27 Feb '12

bob said: > 1. Is there an obvious reason not to use: well, that won't work on a kindle... at least it wouldn't a year ago, but i haven't checked to verify it lately. and what works on those old kindles -- some funky "width" statement -- won't work on anything else, which is why i view all of the "conversions" as ok-now-but-maybe-not-next-week _temporary_ solutions. i think it's a mistake to try to aim for some write-once-read-everywhere solution, because it's probably _not_ even possible, especially since we're aiming at many different targets that are moving even as we shoot at them. of course, my z.m.l. approach is able to accommodate such a workflow, as it is maximally flexible and extensible. *** jana said: > None that I know of. > Some of us do just that, > for the reason you state. (; poetry markup is just one of the many topics on this list's merry-go-round... and it seemed to me that it musta been very close to exactly one year ago that we were discussing it, since it was when i was coding an online text-to-html tool (which is another perennial topic here). so i looked it up, and yes, indeed, it was february 24th when jana recommended that i look at her work on p.g. #35312... > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/private/gutvol-d/2011-February/007565.html > http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35312 i did, and was surprised to find that it was full of flaws, in my humble opinion, not just in the .mobi and the .epub, but even in the .html displayed in a browser, and so i shared my description of them. and i just looked at the file again, to see if jana had fixed the flaws. nope; still there. oh well. perhaps they'll be fixed by the time y'all discuss this same topic _next_ february. -bowerbird

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