- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Main FTP server appears to be down
by Jared Buck 01 May '15

01 May '15

Anybody know what is going on with the main FTP site at ibiblio.org? the FTP, rsync, and ibiblio.org website are down currently. also, PG's website appears to be down as well. Jared

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do you miss the good old days of gutvol-d?
by bowerbird 05 Mar '15

05 Mar '15

do you miss the good old days of gutvol-d? if so, i do sympathize with you; but it's over. nonetheless, with so many rehashes over those topics, it's clear they were evergreen. so if you're into a nostalgia thing, i suggest you trip on over to the "gitenberg" listserve: > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gitenberg-project lots of material there to amuse you... toddle-do... -bowerbird

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Unicode UTF-8 Compatible Version of Jeebies
by James Adcock 02 Mar '15

02 Mar '15

I have finished translating jeebies to a widechar Unicode UTF-8 compatible version “jeebies_u”, if anyone wants it – completing my translation of the three tools – gutcheck, gutspell, and jeebies – to Unicode versions: gutcheck_u, gutspell_u, and jeebies_u. Jeebies_u appears to be mainly more “Unicode friendly” in practice in that it doesn’t mangle curly quotes and apostrophes, making its output more easily read and understood. If you are not using curlies, it may not buy you much, unless you’re mixing in a bunch of Latin extensions or something. Still, its nice to be looking at output which isn’t corrupted. Again, this presumably contains a little “Windows Only”-ish which would take some work to find and fix on say Mac. If people didn’t want “console-out” but would be happy with “file-out” instead then I think it would probably be easier to make these say “Mac friendly.” FWIW below find a snippet output from gutspell_u if someone doesn’t know what we are talking about (assuming your email reader itself does Unicode!) : Gutspell, for example, mangles and queries things that it should not, and does not query things that it should: Ã‰gyptologique_, I, p. 121 (the collection in which it is preserved not Line 2218 - Query word gyptologique protocol reads: â€˜Year 4 in the month of Athyr of King Harmachis, living Line 2222 - Query word Athyr eternally, beloved of Isis, beloved of Amonrasonter, the great god.â€™ Line 2223 - Query word eternally Senobastis sells 1Â½ cubits of waste land (about 40 square metres), Line 2226 - Query word Senobastis Senobastis sells 1Â½ cubits of waste land (about 40 square metres), Line 2226 - Query word sells Senobastis sells 1Â½ cubits of waste land (about 40 square metres), Line 2226 - Query word cubits Senobastis sells 1Â½ cubits of waste land (about 40 square metres), Line 2226 - Query word waste situated in the endowed land of the god Amon near a place Line 2227 - Query word endowed Paos and Psenesis were brothers, a fact which makes the two papyri part Line 2234 - Query word brothers notary, â€˜Petamenophis, the son of Petemestus, ... who writes in the name Line 2236 - Query word writes of the priests of the god Amonrasonter,â€™ and among the sixteen witnesses Line 2237 - Query word sixteen of the priests of the god Amonrasonter,â€™ and among the sixteen witnesses Line 2237 - Query word witnesses on the verso of the papyri eleven are identical in both texts (Pl. Line 2238 - Query word verso on the verso of the papyri eleven are identical in both texts (Pl. Line 2238 - Query word identical These two documents concern two different sales of temple land in the Line 2241 - Query word concern same Theban region between different contractors, of whom two are Line 2242 - Query word contractors every sale was concluded by two documents, the agreement for sale Line 2244 - Query word concluded is evident that we have only half of the complete acts of the two Line 2246 - Query word evident ------------------------------------ Compared to Gutspell_u, which does not mangle output, and which queries the things that it should: Égyptologique_, I, p. 121 (the collection in which it is preserved not Line 2218 - Query word Égyptologique protocol reads: ‘Year 4 in the month of Athyr of King Harmachis, living Line 2222 - Query word Athyr Senobastis sells 1½ cubits of waste land (about 40 square metres), Line 2226 - Query word Senobastis (συγγραφἠ πρἁσεως) and the contract of cession (συγγραφἠ ἁποστασἱου), it Line 2245 - Query word πρἁσεως (συγγραφἠ πρἁσεως) and the contract of cession (συγγραφἠ ἁποστασἱου), it Line 2245 - Query word ἁποστασἱου text is signed by Thothmosis, and has the date of ‘the year 4 the 30th Line 2270 - Query word Thothmosis

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Unicode UTF-8 Compatible Version of Gutcheck
by James Adcock 26 Feb '15

26 Feb '15

I've created a Unicode UTF-8 Compatible Version of Gutcheck, calling it gutcheck_u -- if anyone wants to try it. This was primarily an exercise in finding and changing 8-bit char coding dependencies to 16-bit widechar coding dependencies, but it did require some additional coding. Currently it is a somewhat Windows-dependent implementation, so if you want to run it on another OS it would take a little bit of work. I find it more pleasant to use if one's development file format of choice is UTF-8, and/or if one are doing such things as left-handed / right-handed quotes. Testing it on PG released files I am in fact finding a fair amount of left / right handedness errors that are not currently being discovered. Let me know if you want to try it, same distribution terms as the original. Jim Adcock jimad(a)msn.com

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i told him he was doing it wrong
by bowerbird 10 Feb '15

10 Feb '15

i _told_ him he was doing it wrong. but seth, well, he didn't listen to me. now his project -- "gitenberg", project gutenberg in github -- won a $35,000 prototype award from the knight foundation... that's right. 35 thousand smackers. > http://www.knightfoundation.org/blogs/knightblog/2015/1/30/22-projects-win-… that'll teach him to ignore me... -bowerbird p.s. now i just need to fork the rebase, so the merge will clone my repository, and i can diff the conflict in my commits without recovering fallback authentication or transferring the branch before deletion, as there's an issue configuring the remote, as we see by deleting the unused branches, since collaborators can't update credentials, although you can symlink the submodule tag, or you can push the ssh cache up your nose, but you'll need to filter a request to pull my leg. don't worry, it's ok, as long as you get the gist. because plain-text is the _simple_ format!

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Trans-Pacific Partnership and copyright extensions
by Al Haines 07 Feb '15

07 Feb '15

I received the following from Mark Akrigg, founder of Project Gutenberg Canada: The Electronic Frontier Foundation in the US has just commented on the new TPP mess. It's as good a summary of the situation as I've seen, and is well suited for colleagues outside Canada: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/negotiators-burn-their-last-opport unity-salvage-tpp-caving-copyright-term Al

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state of the union
by bowerbird 21 Jan '15

21 Jan '15

back in the day, michael hart would type in the state of the union speech, by himself, to put in the p.g. library. every year. without fail. eventually, other people as well started typing it in and posting it, and michael would use their text to proof his own, while insisting on doing his version his own way, specifically adding punctuation to indicate pauses, noting applause, and including "ums" and "aahs" -- if, as i hope, i remember correctly. in recent years, the white house itself has released the text of the speech... and last night, for the first time, it posted the text _before_ the speech was even given. meaning, of course, that their "official posted version" failed to include the obama ad-lib -- in response to those republicans who made approving noises when he said he had no more campaigns to run -- "because i won both times". i do believe it would've made michael very happy to have typed those words. i miss you, michael hart, i really do. -bowerbird

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Introducing a tor hidden service mirror.
by _NSAKEY 01 Oct '14

01 Oct '14

After speaking with both Greg and Marcello via e-mail over the last week, I'm happy to announce that there is now a Project Gutenberg mirror which operates as a hidden service on the Tor network. This will give PG's legitimate Tor users a safe way to access the content (As well as attract some spammers, which should pose an interesting challenge for me given the way hidden services are designed). For the moment only the text files are mirrored, but that may change when I get better hardware. The mirror is located here: http://nsakeysjzqismynb.onion/gutenberg/ For those who are unfamiliar with Tor, it can be downloaded here: https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en Please note that access to this mirror is going to be slow due to the nature of hidden services. It may also appear to be down due to a bad connection between circuits. That's just the nature of the game, and part of the reason I'm only hosting the text files for now. - _NSAKEY P. S. The fact that this mirror was launched during Banned Book Week is just a cool coincidence.

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Images +a bit about translations
by arromdee＠rahul.net 03 Jun '14

03 Jun '14

I recently got some old PD books for use on my tablet. The books included some Jules Verne, some H. R. Haggard, and some Wizard of Oz books. My procedure for getting a book is this: 1) Go to archive.org. 2) Check to see which copies of the book have illustrations. If there are significant illustrations, download the book from there in .jp2 format and run it through a script to convert to .jpg. Then put the zip of .jpg files onto my tablet to read. 3) Only if the above step fails, do I get the book from PG. If the book is by Jules Verne, there's an additional step: check the list at http://jv.gilead.org.il/evans/VerneTrans%28biblio%29.html to see which version is a decent quality translation. It often isn't (and even the relatively good ones have some problems). (Given an October post here about Dracula, perhaps I should research versions of the book even when the book was originally in English.) This ties in to a number of posts on this list about bad translations, as well as to posts I made about images, which got lost from the archives (as well as signups during that time period--I had to sign up to this list again). Basically, for illustrations, illustrations on PG books are completely inadequate. What's worse is that the rules strongly suggest that an uploader use an image size and resolution that may have been sensible 10 years ago but is ludicrously small for a high resolution modern tablet, and doesn't show all the detail in the image. As a start I would suggest fixing the rules, but you'd also need some way to automatically generate a small-images version from a large images version (for those people who actually need small images, like over a slow phone connection at an airport, or who have an older reader with limited capabilities). Big images can be used to make small images, but you can't go the other way around. (What is the practical limit on epub image size?) Previous messages about needing better bibliographical information apply to images too, especially since images are very often changed in later editions of the same book.

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Abbyy Finereader 12 "First Look"
by James Adcock 20 Mar '14

20 Mar '14

I finally shrugged my shoulders and upgraded my Finereader 11 to Finereader 12, and my first impression is that the two are almost identical. Finereader 11 was a big step forward. Finereader 12 I think is mainly cosmetic changes from Finereader 11. Finereader 12 does offer more convenient access to "charmap"-like access to the European extension glyphs from within that Finereader editor, which I am finding myself spending more and more time in as I learn how to use it better. IE I'm spending more and more time doing initial editing in the Finereader editor, before exporting into a variety of other formats - including PDF/A for future reference. Finereader 12 seems to still have some "early release" crash issues, where hopefully future bug fix releases will start to clean those crashes up. Finereader 11 also had such early teething problems. If one has an opportunity to pick up 11 cheap [and it looks line one can get a copy for $47], I would say maybe "go for it" rather than $80 for the sales price upgrade to 12. And this is USA-talk - I don't know what deals ABBYY has or doesn't have in other countries.

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