- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: [gutvol-d] Talking about TXT
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 29 Oct '11

29 Oct '11

greg johnson said: > ONE USE of HTML (in emails) makes it > harder for multiple people. > ANOTHER USE of HTML (in PG books) greatly > improves the readability for multiple people. nice try, greg. but reading software can be configured so that either format is equally readable. a great recent innovation in readability -- it's actually _named_ "readability" -- is one that turns the .html of web-pages _back_ to a display more like a text-file. it also eliminates a lot of the _crud_ that many web-pages have today -- e.g., ads, recent-tweet slideshows, and all of that, which is a tremendous relief as well -- but the heart of its charm is that it gives a straightforward rendering of the words. listserve software could easily use .html, and e-books could easily use plain-text. conversely, both of them could use both. it's just a small matter of programming... likewise, converters between the two are exceedingly common. if you need a link to some that work well, just let me know. programmers know the truth of formats: they ultimately end up meaning very little. what is important is _not_ how the data is wrapped, but what happens after extraction. only non-programmers are foolish enough to think a format can accomplish anything. if we took all of the energy which has been _wasted_ on formats in the past decade and put it instead into improving our programs, we would be light-years ahead of ourselves. instead, now we have listserve software that often fails for many, in one way or another. on the e-book front, we're now re-living the "browser wars" from world-wide-web history. somehow, the format wonks _never_ learn... the good news is _users_ are now aware of the importance of apps to user-experience. programmers can go directly to end-users, without wading through the format-wonks. *** greg said: > Here's an attempt to get at an > objective truth behind the format wars as per above, only non-programmers will even bother to think formats really matter. and get all strung out trying to make them. > a format that is still all ASCII > but removes all the end-of-column CR's, and > only has double returns at the end of paragraphs. first, if you eliminate the end-of-line characters, there's no need for end-of-paragraph characters to be doubled -- singles work just fine, thanks... but the mid-paragraph linebreaks in p.g. e-texts aren't really a problem that's all _that_ serious... they can be rather-easily removed systematically. if they seem serious to you, it's only because you are using some inferior and very stupid software. > Yeah, some peeps might be able to > write a program that takes out these CR's, > but I know one time I tried it in something > like MS Word, I messed it up worse. ms-word isn't the best programming environment. and if your first attempt ended in failure, then i can _invite_ you to "join the club", but to do that, you'll have to request the paperwork to be a member, and you'll have to fill it out, and send it in, and hear back, and if you're accepted, you'll have to pay dues to join. one failed attempt simply ain't enough to get inside... so if you wanna join the club, you'll need to do more. but there's no need, really, because if you really want to know how to do the job, start the dialog with me... by the time it's over, you'll know everything you need to know about how to do the job, easily and accurately. the important thing to know is that if your viewer-apps cannot do this for you, _automatically_, the problem is in your viewer-apps, not necessarily in the text-format. your viewer-apps should be able to handle any format that has included all of the reasonably important data. > I'm not advocating for HTML, but for > a TXT version without the 80 char line breaks. again, the 80-character line-breaks are easy to fix. so you're barking up the wrong tree. concentrate on the things that are _not_ easy to fix, instead, please... some of the p.g. e-texts do not include information about the _structural_ aspects underlying the text... for instance, they're missing information on italics. or they don't have a clear indication of blockquotes. _those_ are the shortcomings in the p.g. text-format. and -- in reality -- they are the fault of _the_people_ who prepared the e-texts, not endemic in the format. those structural aspects _can_ be coded in plain-text, it was just that the person _failed_ to do that coding. or the workflow failed to tell them that they should! believe it or not, i had to _fight_ to get p.g. to require that italics should get marked in the plain-text files... _greg_newby_ himself said that it was "unnecessary". in 2003! when the library already had 10,000 books! greg is a smart man. hey, he _must_ be, since he is a professor at a university in alaska, a professor with a library-science degree... but what he said that day was stupid... very very stupid... exceedingly stupid... luckily, he was big enough to admit he was wrong... and jim adcock, the jim who is continually railing on about all the deficiencies of the p.g. e-text format? we saw here that -- at least on one book he posted, but probably _every_ book he had done up to then -- jim _deleted_ italics markup from the book's e-text. he included it in the .html version, but then actually _deleted_ it from the text-version. so unbelievable! the text versions will, of course, be utterly useless if you've decided that you'll intentionally neuter them... but a well-prepared text-version, like a .zml file, can be converted into .html, .pdf, .epub, .mobi, or any number of new formats that might come along. and, with a good app, be viewed on an old machine, and not just viewed, but -- again, with a good app -- turned into a dynamite e-book with rad functionality. forget formats. concentrate on improving apps. -bowerbird

1 0

"Peachmonk" books
by Simon Tarlink 29 Oct '11

29 Oct '11

@Al "Peachmonk, a serio-comic detective tale in which no firearms are used and no one is killed" (1917) is by John Eyerman (1867). Aside from a few very serious books about genealogy and paleontology, the only other offering Eyerman published is not a "Peachmonk" book, but closely allied. "Blankenberghe, a serio-comic detective tale in which no firearms are used and no one is killed" (1910). Neither book is in PG-INT. I would consider mounting both of them as projects at DPC, but neither would make much sense in ASCII text version, and Blankenberghe would only work in HTML, as a series of illos of the pages, due to the extensive use of fancy fonts in the original. As to considering them a "catalog" of titles to be produced by the DP community (and possibly linking them to the Eyerman books), the author has used many of the books of fame as elements in telling his story-many will already be in PG-INT. The balance would constitute a considerable backlog for DP production for years to come). There are 543 titles mentioned in Blankenberghe, for example. Interested in tracking them all down-a sort of Eyerman UberProject? Cheers Simple Simon

2 1

Re: [gutvol-d] sometimes i despair
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 29 Oct '11

29 Oct '11

the other alex said: > If you expect politeness, you first > need to be considerate yourself. i haven't expected "politeness" from this list since the very first day that i came here, and the subsequent years have only confirmed it. i interact very politely with everyone who interacts politely with me... _everyone_... heck, i will even interact politely with people who have made me their "enemy" in the past, providing that they interact politely with me... i am also constantly amused by those people who tell me that i "first need to be considerate" myself, since they regularly fail to follow their own advice. i don't call people names. i don't do ad hominem. i make long posts that are elaborately documented. but some other people call _me_ names, and they do ad hominem on _me_, and they _never_ever_ seem to take much time to address my arguments. i don't do ad hominem, because i don't need to... even when i say something is _"stupid"_, i address _the_argument_ (or its absence), not _the_person_, unless pushed to the edge by excessive repetition. nobody here is stupid. i'd guess that you all score "above average" on an i.q. test. but _some_ of you do -- on occasion -- say some very stupid things... > Setting aside the flood of abuse you > regularly hurl at respected members of this list oh please. what, when, where. be specific, because _you_, alex -- right _now_ -- are doing ad hominem. > I asked you many months ago why you -- > as the only person here, to my knowledge -- > insist on contributing to this list > in ugly, bloated HTML emails, > instead of in plain-text, which is > the gold standard of mailing-lists, > especially (!) tech lists. well, first of all, alex, i have informed you that you are in my kill-filter, which means that you shouldn't really expect a reply from me, ever... by the way, very few people make my kill-filter. you must have said some _very_ stupid things... i read this post of yours on the listserve website, more or less by accident, but if i had been reading my e-mail, i never ever would have seen your post. i _did_ see your earlier queston, and i chose not to answer it, because it wouldn't have done any good. yes, my posts to this listserve come here as .html, not because i "insist" on that, but simply because the a.o.l. client provides no way to make a choice as to what it sends out. and yes, that's backwards. but it is what it is. so you will have to live with it... so, do you feel like that answer did you any good? yeah, i didn't think so. so now you will pursue your attack tactics, and point out that i could use some other software, one which _did_ give me a choice in the matter, and you will ask me why i don't do that instead? so here's my answer to that -- _i_don't_want_to_. do you feel like _that_ answer did you any good? yeah, i didn't think that it would, either. so then you will proceed to escalate your attack. you'll say "the fact that you don't want to change indicates that you're doing all this on purpose..." and i'll say "if i could take an action that would make the a.o.l. client work correctly, i _would_. but i cannot. so that's just the way it is, alex." i could also point out that it's not even in _my_ best interests to have my posts fall outside the threads in which they belong... think about it... but that won't make you happy, so you'll repeat the thing that you just said... and so then i will repeat what i just said, so you'll repeat it again. and then i'll get bored with all of that, and say "ya know, that's what happens when technocrats try to force a 'standard' on everyone. i'm sure the people at a.o.l. thought they were moving _forward_ by using .html instead of plain-text, just like the e-book standards people thought they were moving forward by mandating that e-books should use .html format exclusively, and again when they updated that to .xhtml, and now when they are changing it to .html5. hey, they always think they know what's best!" so, you see, alex, part of this .html thing is rubbing your nose in the .html when all you _really_ want is just the good ol' plain-text. do you see the bigger point? the metaphor? at least i _could_ say that, if i _decided_ to. it's not true, but it _does_ have a nice ring. the truth is, i'd happily change it right away _if_ i could. but i can't. so live with it, alex, with the takeaway lesson that we all need to make demands that our systems are flexible. > you break a discussion thread, creating > havon on (for example) my iPad and iPhone, etc. alex, i'm sure you meant "havoc" there. typing on your ipad right now, are you? :+) hey, alex, i feel for you. i truly do. it's really very important for all of us to grok how _interdependent_ we are on each other, and how much we have riding on getting our systems to work correctly, for best usage... that's your lesson, alex: our systems _matter_. > If you don't give a damn about messing up > other people's inboxes on a daily basis, see, there you go again, alex, blaming _me_ for some "decision" that i supposedly made, thinking that it means i "don't give a damn". social psychologists have a name for that -- "the fundamental attributional error". we attribute the behavior of other people to _their_character_, something about _them_. not completely, but we error in that direction. our own behavior, on the other hand, we tend to attribute to environmental factors. again, not completely, but it's the tendency. we know all of the factors impinging on us, and how they have impacted our behavior... we know the reason _why_ we did something, and it rarely has to do with "our character"... (particularly not when that'd be unflattering.) and we rarely know the external factors that were acting on somebody else, and might have been _the_ reason for their behavior. instead we say "that's just the way they are". the reality is that most of us are quite plastic, so situations can make us do almost anything. even including herding jews into gas showers. that's how pliable we can be, as human beings. kinda scary to think about, isn't it? very scary. > you can't be surprised > at the lack of civility you're experiencing, i haven't been "surprised" by the lack of civility since my very first day on this listserve, alex... (marcello, that's your cue... don't be late...) > or the lack of interest in > your innumerable projects. when i want to stir up interest in my projects, i'll release them publicly. that time will come. -bowerbird p.s. and once again, for alex and everyone else who gets irritated by reading my posts: _stop._ just stop! don't read them! i don't care! really! indeed, i'd much rather have you not read them than read them and get yourself all worked up... seriously. none of us needs the drama. nobody. put me in your kill-file if you can't resist my posts. you will be doing a favor to me, you, and everyone.

14 23

Re: [gutvol-d] Sometimes I despair
by Greg M. Johnson 28 Oct '11

28 Oct '11

>> Enforcing "no HTML" in mailman mailing lists >> is easy, just an option in the content filters >> section. Bowerbird wrote: > i will support a "no html" policy here... > ...if we enforce it on the library as well! > whaddya say, guys? can we work a deal? > you don't really wanna be hypocrites, do you? ONE USE of HTML (in emails) makes it harder for multiple people. ANOTHER USE of HTML (in PG books) greatly improves the readability for multiple people. A raw text format would be cool-- as I've argued in the past-- much cooler than the TXT80 format, with the 80 columns. That PG's TXT isn't true raw text is why we need to go to/ keep HTML. Some might be able to write a program that does it, but it sets up a barrier to easy reading access of the books. -- Greg M. Johnson http://pterandon.blogspot.com

1 0

see how they play their little game?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Oct '11

28 Oct '11

ok, all you new people, see how my antagonists play their little game? one by one, they come, all calling me names and insulting me, and throwing mud on me, until eventually it all cumulates in a mess... you tire of the thread, get sick of the drama, and soon stop reading. pretty clever, hunh? meanwhile, because i had to do a response to each of these twits, they manage to make me look like the one who flooded your box. that's why wolves operate in packs... and they think you're too stupid to notice... too stupid to notice their blatant hypocrisy by calling me "mean" and "disrespectful", when _they_ are the parties guilty of that. they call me "a troll", as if i were the one who was responsible for them sending in their nasty messages... pretty slick, eh? they accuse me of "going off-topic", but they seem to think the topic here is bashing bowerbird. quietly ask yourself how many of them have a history of adding value here? it's all very amusing, don't you think so? and now you have seen it for yourself, so you too know just how they play their little game... -bowerbird p.s. for the winner of this iteration, i pick walter hoist. his accusation that i'm suffering from a "persecution complex" was simply brilliant. after all, why would i feel "persecuted" just because all of these people are calling me names? must be something wrong with me... the other finalist, finishing in second, was lee passey, with the good old classic "crazy uncle" charge. it's well-used, sure, but that's because you can't dispute it without becoming "the crazy uncle", so it's fool-proof! and yes, i _have_ stopped beating my wife. finally. at least i think i've stopped... maybe. for a while, anyway. well, i'm trying... last night was just an accident.

1 0

Re: [gutvol-d] Fwd: Re: epubeditor.sourceforge.net
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Oct '11

27 Oct '11

jimmy said: > they did quite a lot of work to bring the engine itself up > to modern standards, and have been relatively successful jimmy, that's fantastic news! i myself don't do too much scanning, not books -- more interested in _birthing_ digital-books -- but the people over at d.p. will love to hear this... they've really tried to use tesseract in the past -- and i mean they truly _wanted_ it to work! -- but it just didn't perform at the level required... so they keep using finereader. (and, for anyone out there wondering about it, no, they don't use the o.c.r. from archive.org... even when archive.org stuff isn't fatally flawed, the d.p. people have found they can usually get better results from their own scanning efforts. don't know why that's true, but it's interesting.) so i hope d.p. people from here spread the word. (they usually erect a big cone of silence around this listserve, because they don't want the people from over there to know about me, or hear me... they banned me over there, where i'm now known as he-who-cannot-be-named, a.k.a., voldemart.) > It got a huge shot in the arm > when the Android guys took notice ok, that makes sense. because i've definitely noticed that it's now being incorporated even at the level of apps these days. and i must be honest that one thing which i had never anticipated is how it would be paired with _translation_ software, for some _killer_ synergy. my word! those apps, where you point your phone at a sign and it is translated in real-time, are stupendous! and when you think how they could be improved with some crowd-sourcing and mechanical-turk, the realm of possibilities gets truly staggering! > is due to be released around Thanksgiving? > I'm not American, so I only have a vague idea > of when that is :) the 4th thursday in november. 4 weeks from today. -bowerbird

2 1

sometimes i despair
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Oct '11

27 Oct '11

the other alex said: > Egomania in action. It's always "me, me, me you know, dude, i would find it _much_ easier not to talk about "me, me, me" if _you_, alex, would stop talking about me! i'd guess _half_ the posts you've ever made to the list -- ever! -- have been directly _to_ me or else _about_ me... how about you stop posting about me? how about you leave me alone? stop your stalking. -bowerbird

2 1

Re: [gutvol-d] Fwd: Re: epubeditor.sourceforge.net
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Oct '11

27 Oct '11

jimmy, thanks for your input. it's cool. but i'm guessing you must be new... very new... because some of these things we just went over. i'll run though them again, but only very quickly, because i'm afraid of boring the lurkers... :+) > It could be a "Field of Dreams" ploy - > if we provide it, they will come (and fix it). nope. almost all of my requests were targeted at _creating_ a system for users to correct their text. but i couldn't get the minimal cooperation necessary from the archive.org folks to _build_ such a system... they don't seem to care in the least to have it "fixed". > Maybe there just aren't enough of them in general. there seems to be no shortage of them when it comes to making the mess in the first place. only in cleaning it up. > I'm not a data scientist, and I don't play one on the internet, > but if they were trying to do it the right way, I imagine they > would collect a representative sample of their collection, > test on that, and if the results were 1) positive and > 2) statistically significant, they would then (and only then) > attempt it on the entire collection. well, yeah, that would be "research methodology" level 101. unfortunately, archive.org is still stuck back in kindergarten. as i have gone over recently, the o.c.r. has _correctable_ stuff like spacey commas -- literally commas preceded by a space. you don't have to "do research" to know how to correct those. you just need to do a reg-ex across the entire text collection. like i said, jimmy, kindergarten. nap time and everything. > so if they had tried, without considering language, > they could easily have come up with a negative result even in kindergarten, it's easy to tell if a book is in english. but it doesn't matter, because what you are describing is _way_ over their head. it's _miles_ over their head. really. to bring the discussion back to the level of actual reality, consider that the text for _many_ archive.org books lost its em-dashes. the em-dashes were accidentally deleted sometime _after_ the o.c.r. and the text-file was posted... for an example of such a book, look here: > http:// ia700303.us.archive.org/10/items/booksandculture00mabirich/booksandculture00 mabirich_djvu.txt go down to page 30, and then compare the text to this: > http://z-m-l.com/go/mabie/mabiep030.jpg voila. you'll see that the em-dash has simply vanished... (ditto with the end-of-line hyphen, as well as a couple of apostrophes, but we'll just focus on em-dashes for now, because that glitch can't be solved by software algorithm.) this problem has been exceedingly common at archive.org. i pointed out this glitch to them many _years_ ago... and they didn't care! they simply didn't care. i'm not kidding. it took me years -- literally _years_ -- of pestering them before they "agreed" to fix this flaw. and -- as we see -- years after they promised that, things _still_ ain't fixed... i mean, seriously, jimmy. if they are unwilling to fix a bug that's _this_ serious -- across tens of thousands of books -- they certainly won't do the type of stuff you're talking about. kindergarten, jimmy. kindergarten. that's where they are. and every year they keep being "held back" to _repeat_ it... > Have you tried reporting that as an individual bug? you make me chuckle, jimmy. :+) if they won't replace missing em-dashes, you can bet your very last dollar they don't care about pagebreaks. when i initially reported the em-dash glitch, i was very nice, as i thought they would be very appreciative, and thank me for the error-report, and be embarrassed by the lapse in their quality-control which allowed such a grievous problem to _exist_, let alone be widespread... instead, they turned _me_ into "the bad guy", and they ignored me, and when they could no longer ignore me, they demonized me, and eventually they _banned_ me. they are not being interested in "bug-reports", jimmy... as far as i can tell, that's the last thing they wanna hear. > Specific issues like that are more easily acted upon > than general issues, and maybe they can > add up to a general improvement. well, it's hard for me to imagine something more "specific" than tens of thousands of books missing their em-dashes. (not to mention the end-of-line dashes and apostrophes.) and i am sure this problem could be "easily acted upon"... somewhere along the line, they made an encoding error, and it couldn't be all _that_ difficult to track down where. (just look at every change, and see where they disappear.) but i can't describe to you the stunning immensity of their total, complete apathy about solving this specific problem. except, perhaps, to point out that -- years later -- i can still give a u.r.l. that points you directly to a book with the issue. (and i assure you with great confidence it's not the only one.) > I haven't used Finereader for quite some time, > but I do remember that it got the image segmentation > quite badly wrong from time to time, so perhaps it was > safer to trade some gibberish for missing text? they had to get the picture locations to clip the pictures. > Well, that's just bizarre. > Maybe the other hand was holding a crack pipe? you funny. :+) but on a serious note, running one of their scanners is an extremely challenging job, because it's both boring _and_ demanding of attention. takes a special person. so errors like that happen. they are to be fully expected. what's _wrong_ with this picture is that those mis-scans should have been discarded, not included in the final set. that's a problem with workflow. not the person scanning. > Are you referring to another XML file here? > The excerpt you posted was of Finereader's own XML, > which is more or less just a dump of its internal state. right. finereader took a "dump", and archive.org archived it. whole. and now suggests we trawl it, to find any good stuff. including all of those em-dashes which their workflow "lost". i mean, if there were _diamonds_ in this dump, i'd do it... but em-dashes? um, no thanks. in many cases, it would be quicker just to re-do the o.c.r. > The OCR project I'm loosely affiliated with, Tesseract, > is also a Google product. I was aware of that, and > I was told a few things about it, but as I can't remember > which I was asked not to repeat, I'd just prefer to > stay on the safe side and not mention anything about it :) i'll save you the trouble. tesseract is a piece of crap. :+) but its lousy performance will mean that google has to do a lot of very hard work to write the routines that can correct the lousy output turned out by that piece of crap. which will turn out to be a _great_ thing in the long run. but hey, i would _love_ an open-source o.c.r. program. love love love... so if you can turn it into a worthy app, i'm sure a lot of people like me will heap praise on you. ok, yes, i admit it, i haven't actually evaluated tesseract in the last year or so, so maybe it improved immensely. _maybe_. but i really doubt it. it needed a lot of work. but hey, let me know if i'm wrong, ok?, and i'll review it. > Now that I didn't know. Seems counterproductive. if my enemy buys my friend, my friend is no longer my friend. > The XML data is quite poor for that purpose, as > it lacks word coordinates, so I chose not to mention it. > (I think they made public the scripts they use to > convert the data into a usable form for that purpose, > but I'm not sure). hmm... i guess i'll have to take another look at that. as soon as i work up the nerve; i'm allergic to x.m.l. -bowerbird

2 1

Re: [gutvol-d] sometimes i despair
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Oct '11

27 Oct '11

carlo said: > Enforcing "no HTML" in mailman mailing lists is easy, > just an option in the content filters section. i will support a "no html" policy here... ...if we enforce it on the library as well! whaddya say, guys? can we work a deal? you don't really wanna be hypocrites, do you? > This would be fully in line with > the philosophy of Michael (only text matters) > that BB too preaches. uh, no, carlo, that's massively dishonest, and you know it. first of all, michael only insisted the text-file be present. he _never_ disallowed some other format, provided that the advocate did all the work of supporting that format... heck, michael even offered disk-space for other formats! the correct perspective is he supported format diversity... and me? i have shown all of you, repeatedly, exactly how you can use the text-file to generate many other formats. i've also released cost-free tools that do such conversions. i believe that shows that i believe in format-diversity too... so the spin you attempted here was quite clumsy as well... -bowerbird

1 0

Seeking German->English translator
by Greg Newby 27 Oct '11

27 Oct '11

I'm forwarding a request for the site http://www.publicdomainproject.org/ Please contact Chkristoph if you are interested: Christoph Zimmermann <christoph(a)bigbeat.ch> -- Greg ----- Forwarded message from Christoph Zimmermann <christoph(a)bigbeat.ch> ----- Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2011 22:09:11 +0200 From: Christoph Zimmermann <christoph(a)bigbeat.ch> To: Greg Newby <newby(a)arsc.edu>, Feldmahler <feldmahler(a)imslp.org> Subject: Publicdomain Project: We search a translator Hi Greg and Edward I write to you because in the past 8 month we didn't manage to find someone who is willing/able to translate our PR text to english. The text is written in german by a theater director. In my opinion he did a great job targeting this text to potential sponsors at cultural departements, foundations and others. We are looking for a person who is able to understand a german text and is willing to write a PR text about our project. It should sound attractive and should gain interest when people working in the cultural area are reading it (That's why we never try it ourself to translate such an PR text, it's just too important :-)) We can't spend the money for a professional translator here in europe. But we are able to pay something for this translation. So if you know some students, temporally unemployed, volunteers,... persons and/or someone who loves/collects/lives music and is able to read german we are really happy to hear from you. Thanks, Christoph ----- End forwarded message -----

1 0