- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: [gutvol-d] Basic simple test case.
by don kretz 18 Oct '12

18 Oct '12

Why? To discuss as an illustration of proper handling of the issues you list, and others; and to see what alternative markup schemes look like in action. Sent from my Phone ------------------------------ From: James Adcock Sent: 10/10/2012 4:53 AM To: Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion Subject: Re: [gutvol-d] Basic simple test case. Re 14668: Well, the first question would be: Why? Contrary to the idea that PG needs to scale up efforts 10X and “do everything” maybe the right answer is to scale DOWN things by 10X and fix the books that people actually want to read, but which are currently hopelessly gone moldy, rather than offer more kiddie readers? Secondly, one needs to get page scans, which are at least available from Google in a variety of editions, you’d have to pick one. In terms of the current “automagic” HTML conversion from txt, this txt shows the problem that PG isn’t even currently “correctly” specifying that similar <p> formatting be used on each device. Seems given the PG txt conventions, PG should be specifying “no indent, 1em of white space between paragraphs” for the <p> styling – so at least the basics match the txt styling. This is important because txt “formatters” implicitly are using the txt formatting rules as an element of the formatting – i.e. syntax vs. semantics **cannot** be uniquely determined automagically by examining a PG txt file, so the best one can hope to do is to emulate the PG txt layout. In terms of hand-recoding the html/epub/mobi there appears to be no great problems other than understanding and dealing with the issue of merged/rounded top/bottom margins or not, which can be dealt with in the standard manner of using top margins only. In terms of design issues, there appears to be minor issues of poetry – not hard since the poetry lines are short. (how to “correctly” autowrap lines of poetry remains problematic in html since html doesn’t support poetry) There are issues of quasi-table listings of words, where the traditional solution is simply to linearize the lists. IE these word lists were “packed” on paper to save paper, but on ebook devices vertical landscape is “free” [horizontal landscape however definitely **is not**] so the word lists can simply be “unpacked.” And there appears to be a minor issue of plain rules vs. decorative rules. * * But all this would still beg the first question: Why? Who is the customer? What parent would want this for their kid today? Seriously? Is some researcher interested in this for historical reasons? Well – frankly they would be better off examining the bitmap scans. Fundamentally, one can’t code anything reasonable unless you decide who the customer is, and how they are going to actually be using your efforts.

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meanwhile, elsewhere
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 Oct '12

17 Oct '12

james said: > I'm looking for this program https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ovgn8muzrn5nsku/soU0qln53Z -bowerbird

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meanwhile, elsewhere
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 Oct '12

17 Oct '12

meanwhile, elsewhere... *** there's someone over at d.p. -- "tallforasmurf" -- who's programmed a post-processing application. it's called "ppqt". i wasn't able to get it to load up my page-scans, so i couldn't really give it a proper workout, but a cursory glance said it looks quite impressive... roger frank is doing a book with it, so maybe he will be kind enough to post his review of it here. it's built in python, meaning that it _might_ be relatively easy to make it a web-app as well, and the web-or-offline-whatever-you-feel-like-now mode _is_ the right way to fashion this toolset... so that's good news... *** and because it hardly ever gets mentioned here, let alone as often as it _should_ be, especially if we are talking about "p.g. times 10", check out: > http://en.wikisource.org their m.o. is progressive enhancement of _lots_ of books, which means they rarely get to certify _any_ of them as "finally finished", but that _is_ the wiki way; given that model, wikisource rocks. *** haveaniceweekend... :+) -bowerbird

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"i had no idea"
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 Oct '12

17 Oct '12

james said: > I had no idea the process > would be as difficult > as it turned out to be. did you do any research about it first? where did your expectations come from? and since i know some of your false-starts, james, i think it's absolutely clear that project gutenberg needs to do a much better job of explaining this... sending people to d.p. is an _awful_ strategy, since the workflow there works so badly for independents. and, as i have shown, i developed a good workflow over 5 years ago, and documented it exhaustively... who else here -- besides james, in his book on it -- has done _anything_ to also describe and document? remember, putting "describe and document workflow" on a checklist _does_not_count_ as satisfying the task. unless, of course, your only task is to make a checklist. -bowerbird

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(no subject)
by don kretz 17 Oct '12

17 Oct '12

For background to address Item 2 of the PG process, I went through a little exercise to put myself in the place of a potential volunteer - someone who would like to contribute a book. What would the experience be like? For a volunteer organization, this kind of person would presumably be worth attracting and trying to recruit. This post describes what I found. Imagine a person, Polly, who is new to Project Gutenberg, and she is only slightly acquainted with Distributed Proofreaders – tried it once, but found it daunting and left (as do most other people who try it). She has a book she wants to contribute. If she starts at PG, it’s likely she will begin with www.gutenberg.org. The first link on the page that looks like it might help is > > No fee or registration is required, but if you find Project Gutenberg > useful, we kindly ask you to donate a small amount<http://eb.readingroo.ms/wiki/Gutenberg:Project_Gutenberg_Needs_Your_Donation>so we can buy and digitize more books. Other ways to help include digitizing > more books <http://www.pgdp.net>, recording audio books<http://librivox.org>, > or reporting errors<http://eb.readingroo.ms/wiki/Gutenberg:Contact_Information#Electronic_Mail> > . > (She hopes that the order in which the list itemizes the ways she could help is the order in which they prioritize here help.) The option for “digitizing more books” looks promising. She clicks it, and it leads straight to Distributed Proofreading’s main page. Polly would like to try a more direct approach to PG before tackling DP again. Besides her personal experience, she knows about the overhead and delays involved at DP and she’d like more control of her text, and she’d like to do a lot of the work herself. So the next possibility presented on the page is the Self-Publishing site. But no, that’s probably not what she wants; it’s not a new book, and she isn’t the author. But there’s no further guidance on the main page. So she explores some of the non-specific links. Next she finds the “How-To” index, with links to further information. One (and only one) appears promising. It says “Gutenberg:Public Domain eBook Submission How-To”. She tries that next. This page<http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Public_Domain_eBook_Submission_How-…>has a lot of information, but nothing like a checklist, and seems to assume she already knows how the pieces fit together. Primarily, though, it repeatedly refers her back to Distributed Proofreaders. And there are a lot of words and software application names that she doesn’t understand at all. This is beginning to look really complicated and, well, difficult. Intended for people who already know what to do. We could go on and describe what happens when Polly goes next to the DP site, and has similar difficulty finding help (which is mostly in the Wiki, which itself has its challenges.) And substantively, it leads right back to PG for information and procedures that Polly couldn't locate in the PG structure itself. What is clear is that PG doesn't really offer a useful way for potential volunteers to learn how they can contribute. It mostly points to DP. Even to contribute an etext. In terms of order-of-magnitude scalable growth, though, DP, for all its other benefits, is more like the problem than the solution. So new and different procedures need to be considered, not to replace DP, but to give more options to people who don't fit the DP work pattern. Next I'll post some notes I have about some alternatives for handling metadata checklistsand copyright clearance procedures (not necessarily for the PG process, with which I am totally unfamiliar and can't contribute anything, but on the public side of helping ease through to the next step where they have a genuine publishable project.)

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blah blah blah more more more blah blah blah
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 Oct '12

17 Oct '12

don't forget the ponies! (everyone always forgets the ponies!) and more jobs! and fewer taxes! and support for small businesses! and, for heaven's sake, lower gas prices! god bless america! -bowerbird p.s. in other words, leave sound-bites to the politicians, because they are obviously much better at it than we are.

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blah blah blah blah mcguff blah blah
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Oct '12

16 Oct '12

don said: > Wikipedia view of the significance of McGuffey: but don, do you have correct text for the book? if you want people to do a markup demonstration, then you'll need to furnish us with the correct text. i'm not gonna glorify faulty text with good markup. and the book isn't nearly important enough _to_me_ to spend _any_ of my time correcting the text myself. and if i'm gonna do a demo with "dummy" text -- which, by the way, i am probably _not_ gonna do -- i will do it with good old stupid lorem ipsum... you like to read up on stuff, don, so read up on the need for a test-suite, and how to make one. -bowerbird p.s. note that even then, this book wouldn't be a _good_ test, because it lacks plenty of structures... p.p.s. also, it's kind of silly to be picking on .rst... in spite of marcello's difficulties, the python world has been using .rst for its documentation for years.

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a description of the book-digitization workflow
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Oct '12

15 Oct '12

ok, i got a couple requests backchannel to see my website that walks you through the process of the steps that're involving in digitizing a book. (hi john, hi fish.) unfortunately, there are still some holes in the site (where the routine to handle a step isn't coded yet) and i don't know when i'll have the time to fill them. but meanwhile, i collected that 2006 series of posts i made to the "bookpeople" listserve that covers it... i've mounted the entire series here, in one file: > http://zenmagiclove.com/misc/feedback2umichigan.txt if you have any questions after reading that monster, i'll be happy to answer them here... -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] no subject -- the perfect header for that post
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Oct '12

15 Oct '12

don said: > I went through a little exercise to > put myself in the place of a potential volunteer - > someone who would like to contribute a book i have been waiting, very patiently, for such people to start crawling out of the woodwork, since 2006... as time goes by, i have become _less_ convinced that anyone will eventually emerge, not _more_ convinced. but in the increasingly unlikely event someone _does_, you could point them to the posts i made back in 2006 on the bookpeople listserve, where i detail the process. the "feedback to umichigan" thread is particularly good, since i cover a digitization from start to finish, in detail, but the posts titled "monday morning quarterback" and "continuous proofreading" also have additional pointers. and if a dozen such people should (miraculously) appear, let me know, and i will activate my site that allows people to walk through the digitization process step by step, with single-focus web-apps that help them negotiate each task. -bowerbird

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top 10 reasons why this current thread will go nowhere -- #7
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 Oct '12

14 Oct '12

#7. d.p. post-processors were recruited with "you can do it your way." #8. if your workflow has no supporting tools, you have no workflow. #9. this list has proven it can ignore a solution put right in front of it. #10. that is where these threads always go, and nothing has changed. -bowerbird

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