- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

before you leave, jon
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Sep '12

28 Sep '12

before you leave, jon, maybe you can answer a couple of questions for me... you once coded a little demo that had a page-scan that scrolled line-by-line in a window, according to the position of the cursor in an adjacent textarea... my questions are concerning that code. specifically, was it python or javascript? i think you made the code open-source. if that's correct, where can it be found? and, maybe the most important of all: how was it, exactly, that you did that? the synchronization part's easy enough, but how did you get the coordinates of each line? did you do that on-the-fly? can you get them for an arbitrary scan? i do this in my offline (realbasic) apps by assessing the color of the pixels at several specific points in the scan, but i don't see how to do that in a browser. so is _that_ what you were doing there? and finally, if that is indeed what you do, can you do such pixel-color-probing on any old div (or screen location), or will it only work on graphics, like page-scans? -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] blah blah blah blah blah
by don kretz 28 Sep '12

28 Sep '12

Sent from my Phone From: James Adcock Sent: 9/28/2012 7:22 AM To: gbnewby(a)pglaf.org; Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion Subject: Re: [gutvol-d] blah blah blah blah blah > It's OK to choose a title we already have. Tell that to your webmaster and WW'ers who are sending a different message. Again, it is not always trivial for volunteers to provide images, as sometimes the organizations making the images available, rightly or wrongly, claim to put restrictions on the use of those scans. Clearly the text of a "risen to the public domain" work is something PG can accept and post, and the text input of a "risen to the public domain" work is certainly something a volunteer can make and send to PG, so I think that part is well understood. What seems to be less well understood is that providing the actual images could in some cases prove to be more troublesome, in practice, to volunteers. When images can be found in some public location, like archive.org, or are available in multiple places, I usually provide that information as part of the copyright clearance request. If PG thinks that getting and storing a copy of those resources is appropriate, PG should do so. _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d

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One last post
by Jon Hurst 28 Sep '12

28 Sep '12

David Starner wrote: > For all your claims, you advanced RTT as a master format and are now > storming off when it didn't get accepted as the master format. Please do not think I am "storming off". I had a plan that I thought might work. I did the reconnaissance. The plan had a fatal flaw that could not be mitigated. The people that I would need buy-in from didn't buy the core principal that you could have a foundation without specifying a master format. Everyone _wanted_ a master format; so much so, indeed, that they immediately assumed what I was trying to sell must de facto _be_ a master format, and a poor one at that. I am not Bowerbird. I don't think I have all the answers, I don't think that I am always right, I don't think I can insult people into consensus and I don't think that running a solo project and trying to show everyone how clever I am achieves anything whatsoever of consequence, particularly when that solo project isn't actually very impressive. I have listened to what everyone has said and my conclusion is that the problems with the PG library cannot be solved in the way that I suggested they might be. I now have an good understanding of why that is, so I can happily move on to something more productive. Cheers Jon

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DP protocols
by Jon Hurst 28 Sep '12

28 Sep '12

Quick question to Don/Roger/Anyone who PM's at DP. Assume Greg has got us a scan that of P&P. What DP rule are we breaking by skipping P3, F1, F2 and doing a simplified PP consisting of diffing against extant text and converting to UTF-8?

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a master format that has no formatting
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Sep '12

27 Sep '12

roger said: > That means that anyone who derives a final version > (HTML, epub, kf8 etc. file) from it has to find and handle > all the markup like intalics and superscripts on their own. > It's not coded in the RTT if it's coming out of P2, > since formatting is not present in the proofing stages, > even inline formatting. > That is a serious shortcoming to me. it's more than "a serious shortcoming". it's a fatal flaw. anyone who's done a digitization all the way _knows_ that inline formatting is one of the excruciating parts. even the "overall" formatting can be a whole lot of work, but it's generally among the more "fun" parts of the task, which offsets it a bit. but we still have to admit it's work. and some of the finer points (like _proper_paragraphing_) often take lots of time, relatively, and drive you crazy too. so to pretend that a text-file that contains no formatting can be considered as a "master" in any sense of the word is a denial of reality, one that's silly, if not plain ridiculous. and jon will learn this very quickly, just like everyone else. but all you people who know better shouldn't just let him proceed blithely as if this part of his plan was reasonable... because it's not. it's a fatal flaw. -bowerbird p.s. yes, i'm aware that jon said that he'd dialed back the notion of r.t.t. to sidestep all the "religious" wars. that doesn't remove the fact that r.t.t. is unworkable. p.p.s. no, the irony is not lost on me, not lost at all. sometimes people on this listserve make _assertions_ that something is true, when that thing is _not_ true, and has never been true, and likely never _will_ be true. yet other times when there's something that you _know_ to be true, you just sit on your hands and don't say jack. it's as if _truth_ means absolutely _nothing_ to you. weird.

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i must tell you
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Sep '12

27 Sep '12

i must tell you that i am enjoying these threads immensely. because while y'all are doing your endless discussion thing, there's an app right over on my site that is the pudding that is proving that z.m.l. works quite nicely as a master format. you put z.m.l. into a field, and then click a button, and boom!, out pops nice .html, and an .epub, and a .mobi. the offline equivalent app spits out a nice .pdf as well... coming soon is output in the form of an _e-book_app._ so keep up the chatter, kids... it's immensely entertaining... -bowerbird

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let's stop treating our computers as if they are retarded
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Sep '12

27 Sep '12

don said: > We're currently not collecting most of that, > except by inference from the layout; of course, "by inference from the layout" is _precisely_ how we humans understand the structure of our books. despite the fact that headers are not _labeled_ as headers, just to give the most obvious example that comes to mind. we still seem to be able to point out a header just _fine_! likewise, thank goodness we humans don't seem to need to have every paragraph _labeled_, because that would be extremely obtrusive, and unnecessarily awkward, right? let's stop treating our computers as if they are retarded, and need to have everything explicitly spelled out before they are capable of understanding and categorizing it... there are no stupid computers; only inept programmers. for instance, it's quite easy to write a routine that can recognize the headers in any project gutenberg e-text with a very high degree of both certainty and accuracy. and in the cases where our easy-to-code program does make a mistake, we can easily edit the offending e-text, so that it will _not_ cause a problem for our nifty script. ditto with everything else you mentioned, don... -bowerbird

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RST as a master format, readable PG books for Kindle
by James Simmons 27 Sep '12

27 Sep '12

I think the important issue for PG is to create adequately formatted books for the Kindle and Nook. My most recent contribution to PG was this: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39442 This was really a book from hell. It had tons of family tree tables which I reproduced as ASCII art in the text version and both images and ASCII art in the HTML version. I used RST as the master format. The EPUB and Kindle versions of this book do not handle the family tree table (either version) well at all. HOWEVER, with just two changes to what PG is doing with RST submissions the EPUB and Kindle versions could have been quite adequate. Those changes are: 1). Allow pictures which are rotated in the printed book to use the same rotation in the HTML version, instead of requiring it to be rotated "right way up". Looking a pictures in a Kindle or a Nook you have the same constraints a printed book has, and sometimes you just have to rotate a picture so the width of the picture corresponds to the height of the page (or screen). If you leave the orientation of the picture alone the Kindle or Nook reader has a better experience and the web page reader has a tolerable experience. If we consider e-book readers more important that web page viewers (and I think we really should) then we should eliminate the requirement to rotate pictures. 2). Put some kind of directive in the RST file which says "this content belongs in the text file ONLY". This would have dealt with my family tree table problem nicely. Maybe have directives to replace tables wider than three columns with image files in EPUB and Kindle formats, as these readers do not handle large tables well. I found RST easy to work with and plan to use it on any future submissions I do. James Simmons

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backlog blah blah blah
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Sep '12

27 Sep '12

i said: > you might be surprised at some of the solidly-documented > error-reports which whitewashers have completely ignored. now some whitewasher will feel the need to come here and say, "we don't ignore your error-reports; but we do have a backlog". they might also add: "and half of the error-reports we receive are faulty, in that the so-called error is not, in fact, an error." let me grant you both of those points. (even though i have some suspicions about the second one.) my point is that the mere submission of an error-report does _not_ mean the "errors" will be fixed immediately... ...or at all... jim can tell you more about this, if you want to ask him... -bowerbird p.s. although maybe i should have let a whitewasher appear. wouldn't it be nice, every once in a while, to hear from one?

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The fatal flaw
by Jon Hurst 27 Sep '12

27 Sep '12

OK, I just got round to ranting at Bowerbird for ponting out that RTT was a fatal flaw. He's an easy person to start ranting at. I hit the send button too soon perhaps. He considers RTT a fatal flaw. Roger feels pretty much the same. Actually, I don't think I have sold anyone on it. But here's a thing. I'm not wrong in stating that suggesting any master format is a worse flaw unless you happen to belong to that particular camp. So I have acheived my goal. I have found the fatal flaw that keeps this job undone. It turned out not to be PG policy, which could be worked around and actually made a certain amount of sense. It turned out not to be DP intransigence, although that might have come into play. It turns out to be simply that everyone thinks that there must be a master format, and that it has to be the one they prefer. So, I guess that is it. Thanks to everyone for the discussion, and apologies to Bowerbird for the rant... I really tried hard not to. Regards Jon

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