- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

rst2all?
by James Simmons 05 Mar '12

05 Mar '12

I'm thinking about using RST for my next PG submission. The thing is, I want to process the RST file for myself before submitting it, to be certain that I did everything OK. I see the following article: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:RST_tools_for_the_WWers which seems to point me in the right direction except it does not tell me where to get the rst2all utility. Googling rst2all gives me nothing. So how do I get this utility? James Simmons

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Remastered PG epubs - crediting/branding
by Robert Gibbins 04 Mar '12

04 Mar '12

Over the last year or two, I have remastered (as I call it) about 50 PG books in ePub format. In most cases I haven't changed the actual text of the books , other than to correct the odd transcription error if I can find a paper or scanned edition of the book to refer to. So as far as I am concerned these are really PG books in a slightly different format from the ones in the PG repository. About a year ago I added a few of these books to the MobileRead website, and am thinking of gradually adding the others, once I have proof-read them for quality. However I observe that many of the books on the Mobile Read website, although clearly derived originally from Gutenberg sources, do not have any Gutenberg branding, credits, copyright, license, etc. I should like at minimum to preserve the audit trail/ provenance of where the books came from (and also credit the people who did at least much of the work). My preference would be to keep all the Gutenberg branding, merely adding an extra provenance line crediting myself with remastering the epub (and in a few cases detailing other changes I have made) However strictly speaking these are no longer quite the PG originals, so my question is can I do this, or does the PG license prohibit it? Putting the question a different way, how much of the Gutenberg wrappings do I have to delete to be 'legal'? Note: All of these books are stated in their front matter to be out of copyright in the USA, and I believe this is also the case in the UK, where I live, and in Canada where MobileRead is located. There is also no question of wanting to charge for the books. Bob Gibbins

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For those seeking markup challenges...
by Greg Newby 04 Mar '12

04 Mar '12

The Integration of Functions of a Single Variable by G. H. Hardy http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38993 Lotta math. Beautifully done. Dunno if there's an effective path to EPUB or even HTML. -- Greg

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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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