- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: [gutvol-d] a new DVD
by Tony Baechler 17 Sep '05

17 Sep '05

Hello. You are approaching a multiple DVD set as an alternative. Is there any reason for this? I've read your other comments about special collections of various sorts and wanting to cram as much on one DVD as possible, but you didn't address what I said previously. Eventually, there will be too many books to fit on one DVD even without pictures. Why not start moving towards multiple DVDs now while we can before this is mandatory. Even though you and I are blind, you must still consider that many books are useless without the pictures, not to mention books of pictures only. Also what about the audio files and other items which are usually excluded? You could include everything PG has to offer by using two DVDs. I don't really see this as an alternative, I see this as a requirement. Below, you write: At 09:04 PM 9/16/2005 -0500, you wrote: >You bring up another alternative I have considered. That is creating a >multiple DVD set. The problem I see with this is in the free disc >giveaway. Right now we send out a DVD and an extra disc for them to give >to a friend. Adding more discs is obviously going to increase the costs >while almost certainly doing away with the extra disc. Yes, but how many of those extras are actually being given away? Do people tell you that they are going to give it to someone? In other words, you might be wasting the extra DVD anyway if it isn't being given to someone. I think cost is really a non-issue. On sale, blanks cost 25 cents or less in the US. Even if the cost is just too much, I still think it's worth it even if you can't include a set to be given away. You can always include a note that if someone else wants one, just ask. Another idea would be to start giving away CDs instead of DVDs. Still send out DVD sets when they ask but throw in a CD also for them to give away. That might actually be better if the idea is to let as many people as possible know about PG. If the goal instead is to just give as many books away as possible regardless of how useful they are, then I agree that you should throw away everything but plain 7-bit text and hope for the best. I think that makes PG look bad though since now a lot is available in pdf, html, etc. >It's the give away project I was thinking of when I was talking about >cramming as many books on a DVD. Obviously, for the people who can >download, we can create as many ISOS as we want. I was talking about the give away project also. Again, is the goal to just give as many away in any condition no matter what or is it to give away lots of books in a useful format with pictures to show them that there are thousands of books freely available online? If the former, then forget all I said about multiple DVDs. You're right that pictures are not important. If the later, you should include pictures and html versions at a minimum and break them into multiple DVD sets. That has the advantage of showing people that PG is not in fact just plain text although almost all books are available in that form. I would like to respectfully disagree with something. You seem to think that offering huge ISO images for download is no big deal since anyone with broadband can get them. I have broadband but it takes me a very long time to get a 4.7 GB file. For many people, it really isn't practical to burn their own DVDs. My main computer doesn't have a DVD reader. I have a computer with a DVD burner but it doesn't have enough disk space. There is a huge error rate with a file that size and it is a huge pain to combine that many smaller files. Almost all DVD burning packages are expensive, so it would probably cost more to download and burn your own than to just get one sent. Please try to keep this in mind if you are going to create a bunch of ISOs of various sorts. That isn't the easiest thing in the world for people to use. CD images of course are much easier and more practical. Finally, I'm curious about something. Since you are blind, are you putting labels on the DVDs? Are you making labels? I have never found an accessible program to make disc labels. The best I found was covers which I don't want. I would love to find a CD/DVD label making program which I can actually use.

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Re: [gutvol-d] a new DVD
by Tony Baechler 17 Sep '05

17 Sep '05

Hello. I would like to respond to a few points here that you mentioned. First, I am blind also so I have the same bias as you. We need to face facts. The PG collection is now so big that one DVD won't hold everything. You found that out with just including books from DP. Even if we throw away the pictures, audio, and everything except plain ASCII text, it's just not going to fit. I have experimented with this and as near as I could tell it would take at least 4-6 CDs when there were about 11,000 books. Allowing for growth being what it is, and again only including plain 7-bit ASCII as I have, I just see no way of doing this and keeping it maintained. It would be possible maybe for this moment, but in a year it won't be so this is something which needs to be considered now. Second, about the pictures. I see no reason not to include them on the DVD sets. They are not that large and are often necessary to the enjoyment of the books. Even for plain text novels, they can add something. For magazines, they can be essential since there are articles discussing them and it's expected that you will view them while you read the article. Look at Scientific American Supplement for this. I don't consider not including illustrations to be an option. Again, the fact is that even if we squeezed everything on one DVD and throw away html, accented texts, sound, and everything else, fairly soon it won't fit. Since we are now talking about either two DVDs or a double layer, we might as well include pictures, html, and accents. Besides, two DVDs look bigger than one even if the contents are the same. I suppose one possibility would be to offer two different DVDs, one with just plain text for the blind or others with old computers and another with pictures, html, and accents. People could pick what they wanted at the time they fill out the form and you could send them one or the other. Finally, about a new CD. I think keeping CDs up to date is much more important than people believe. I think that for CDs, we shouldn't worry as much about illustrations but should include zipped html. As someone pointed out, 7-zip for Windows is free and lets you view inside of zip files. Just create a page that comes up in the browser telling people that the files on the CD are zipped. Install the 7-zip package in the root directory first and have fun looking at the books. The problem is that you have to manually open each book and look at each image. They don't extract at the same time as they should since it makes a temporary directory and only extracts one file at a time. The XP unzip feature of Windows Explorer does allow extracting all files though and has similar functionality. Linux of course has an unzip utility too so we aren't excluding people. Even the Apple IIgs has an unzip program. The reason why we really need to make sure the CDs are kept current is that giving away a CD is very easy and almost anyone can use it. Many computers don't have DVD readers although the newer ones do. Also, if you release a new CD on a quarterly basis, people think that they are getting the very latest PG books sent to them in one nice form. That of course is true and that's the general idea, but I'm not sure that there would be enough books every quarter to fill a CD every time. Maybe release a CD every 1,000 books. That unfortunately would mean about 15 CDs not counting audio. However, I definitely think that CDs need to be very actively maintained to keep interest up in PG. People will come back if they know there is something new and if they don't have to hunt for it. Heck, splash the availability of the CD on the front page. That could be even better. I don't think the DVD needs to be kept as current. First, it is very difficult to download a 4.7 gb file and burn it. I would like to have all of PG on a DVD but I'm certainly not going to download such a huge file. Yes, it was split into pieces but they have to be recombined and that's way too much effort for me. Second, since we have the iso creator this can be done more on demand. Finally, we have lots of space to work with so if we add 2,000 or 3,000 books at a time it's not a big problem as it would be with a CD since they might not fit. The only thing I suggest on the CD is to break books down into categories. Folders like etext00 etc are not useful to the end user. Something even very broad like "fiction" and "nonfiction" would help. If it could be broken down further such as by magazine, mystery, gardening, etc that would be even better. I have used PG off and on since 1995 and I found it confusing to try to figure out what etext90 and etext91 were. I would much rather have had a nice CD set with works broken down by author or category. I know that _Oliver Twist_ is in a directory called Dickens instead of etext96. Likewise with Mark Twain. Maybe this is already being done, I don't know. I have everything locally so I haven't bothered with a CD image. Also, how hard would it be with the new iso creator to break it down by specific magazines? Have for example magazines/Atlantic_Monthly, magazines/Punch, etc. You could call them periodicals too I suppose. Of course also make sure to put GUTINDEX.ALL in the root so everyone knows how much is available. That's my two cents worth.

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re: [gutvol-d] html header-stuff, doctype and content-type
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Sep '05

16 Sep '05

ok, my file now validates to html 4.01 (circa 1998) and to html 3.2 (circa 1996), so i'm satisfied i have enough backwards compatibility. ;+) of course, it also runs in the browser you're running today, and the one you'll run next year, and the year after that. and it's got all the e-book functionality that one can reasonably expect from a web-browser. thanks for all your help! :+) -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] Clearance question - Mein Kampf
by Wallace J.McLean 16 Sep '05

16 Sep '05

Michael Hart écrit : > Actually, many countried in Europe are still "life +50" or so I am told, > perhaps even half the countries in the world where this copyright would > already have expired, and some are "life +60" > which would make this one expire about now. Last year I drew up a table showing the breakdown of terms under national law around the world. At that time, there were 79 life+50 countries, with 53% of the global population, compared to 51 life+70 countries, with 21% of the population. In Europe, at the time I drafted my table, the remaining life+50 countries were Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Iceland, Moldova, Serbia and Montenegro, and Ukraine. Other than Iceland, only the former Communist world is still under the Berne term, and with Russia caving in, I fear the rest won't be too long to follow, esp. those which are itching for EU membership. If anyone knows for a fact that the situation has changed in any of these countries, lemme know. With Russia's move to life+70, on the global figures you drop one, add one, and change the relative percentages to 51% vs. 23%. For four percent of the world's population, I can't find the term. These are mainly small African, Asian, and Pacific countries. India makes up the biggest chunk of the rest, with its idiosyncratic life+60 rule. There are a handful of countries, mainly in the middle east, with <life+50 terms. On the other hand, there's the horrible situation in Central America. I can't wait till Walt Disney goes before Congress to threaten to move its operations to life+100 Mexico. Oh, won't someone think of the creators?

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Re: [gutvol-d] new CD compilation
by Tony Baechler 16 Sep '05

16 Sep '05

Hi. I would suggest classical music and MIDI files. I would also suggest looking at the Edison files but many of those are English only. The classical music is just music with no words so that shouldn't cause a problem. Unfortunately not all classical music is available in one format. Some is in MIDI, some in a special xml for music, some in one version of Finally and some in a newer version. There are a couple in mp3 too. At 02:30 PM 9/15/2005 -0500, you wrote: >I'd like to also add some books which are unrestricted by language >barriers. Any suggestions? I've already put the Hand Shadows book on >there, but would be interested to hear any more ideas. We've got about >75MB left to fill. Perhaps some of the music files.

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re: [gutvol-d] .tei repostings and evaluation of their .pdf versions
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Sep '05

16 Sep '05

marcello said: > What autority can you bring in to support your claim that > paper books use variable leading "almost exclusively"? you don't need an "autority"; you only need to look at them. you will see, in any nicely-typeset book, that pagespreads are bottom-balanced and there are zero widows or orphans... and if you count the lines on each page, you'll find some spreads where they differ. this mix of facts means variable leading. period. now, i'm done with this conversation, thank you. you simply don't care to learn, so there's no point. if you are happy with your widows and orphans, i'm happy for you. some girls like their pimples. -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] .tei repostings and evaluation of their .pdf versions
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Sep '05

16 Sep '05

marcello said: > This is my authority. Now I'd like to know yours. if you think knuth would defend your .pdf's as they are, you are seriously deluded. if you don't care if typographers would laugh at your output, why should i? the worse your stuff looks, the better mine looks in comparison. but you're not fooling anyone. once people have forgotten that i was the one who pointed out the pimples, you'll fix 'em. have a nice day. -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] .tei repostings and evaluation of their .pdf versions
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Sep '05

16 Sep '05

This is my authority. Now I'd like to know yours.0

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re: [gutvol-d] .tei repostings and evaluation of their .pdf versions
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

marcello said: > If we want to eliminate the widows and clubs we must > - include `stretchability' in the leading or > - have a ragged bottom. paper-books use the first solution, almost exclusively. so that's the one you want. > Both solutions can be worse eyesores than the original problem. untrue. that's why typographers use the variable-leading method. > With stretchable leading the lines on the left hand page > will not match the lines on the right hand page. and that's totally meaningless, which is they use that method. > With ragged bottom, facing pages may be of different length. that problem is not _quite_ so meaningless, because bottom-balancing the page-spread is esthetically pleasing. but if the only way you can get rid of the widows and orphans is to give up bottom-balancing, then do it. the widow/orphan problem is _much_ worse, especially with some _pages_ having one line! nine out of ten typographers will tell you so. (and the tenth one is the worst of those ten.) > In commercial typesetting these problems > are overcome by manually tightening or loosening > some paragraphs on the page, or even making the > author rewrite some of the copy to fit the page. since the introduction of computers into typesetting, the manual adjustment of leading is now antiquated... > In a purely automated process this is impossible. in a purely automated process, copy-fitting is automated. > We also want to keep the flexibility of changing fonts, > page sizes etc. so we cannot insert manual fixes. well, my program controls for widows and orphans, as well as bottom-balancing page-spreads, and yes, it allows the person to change fonts, pagesize, etc. so you won't get very far with that "impossible" line. but hey, if you and your tools can't do it, i understand. still, give up the bottom-balancing if you must do so, because widows and orphans will make typographers laugh at your output... -bowerbird

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.tei repostings and evaluation of their .pdf versions
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

josh, i see a few of your .tei projects were reposted. i looked at your earlier .pdf versions, to evaluate them, but it was very hard to keep at the task for very long. first, they are much _improved_ over earlier attempts, so whoever is refining the xslt -- marcello? you? both? -- deserves some warm encouragement for that. keep it up! in their current state, the .pdf's kind of remind me of a young pre-teen girl. her face might well _be_ pretty, but it's difficult for us to tell, because we can't look at it for long enough to decide, since it's covered with pimples... the "pimples", in your .pdf files, are widows and orphans. to the typographically knowledgeable, they're eyesores. and since they appear so frequently within your .pdf's -- practically every other page-spread -- it's distracting, distracting enough that it's impossible to see much else... fortunately, i think there is probably some easy setting that you can make to eliminate all the windows/orphans. indeed, you might even have made that change already! have you? if so, i'll look at the .pdf's that were reposted, and we can move on to some less-obvious points... -bowerbird

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