- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

call for alpha testers
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 Oct '11

14 Oct '11

i will soon be releasing a text-editor that outputs a file to e-book formats. crossplatform to mac, p.c., and linux. if you'd like to alpha-test it, send me an e-mail and i will shoot you a copy. -bowerbird

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FW: Build our own DP, anybody?
by Dan Weber 14 Oct '11

14 Oct '11

Jim At the risk of starting a war, I disagree. The foreign language books will never be read by most people who visit Gutenberg.org. Almost all people from the USA will be reading English language books. I do not download and will never have time in my lifetime to read these other books. I think the other language books should be on another site. I do think that the books should be digitized, but not listed with the main site's inventory. There could easily be a Gutenberg-spanish.org, Gutenberg-dutch.org, etc.to handle these books. Dan Weber My criteria has always been that if "enough" people want to read it, it's worth doing. Where "enough" is a pretty small number -- if people collectively spend more time reading it than I spend making it, it's probably a "success." Because I'm not putting in the effort in the first place unless [at least on some masochistic level] I'm enjoying the effort. Surprisingly, to me at least, looking at first 30-day download counts of recent additions it seems like just about everything meets this test. "Weak" performers would seem to be the less-common foreign language books, but I don't think people reading this thread would agree that would be a reason not to "want" them. _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d

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some pdf's for you to look at, and consider
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 13 Oct '11

13 Oct '11

it's _one_ thing for me to call some of you "stupid idiots"... but i must admit, it's much nicer when you come and post and _prove_ that yes, indeed, you really are "stupid idiots". what's curious, though, or perhaps downright fascinating, is how stupid idiots can argue with _other_ stupid idiots... at any rate, it's all been very amusing... :+) and i do wish you wouldn't stop, not quite yet, ok? ;+) *** but... for the lurkers... if you need solid food to lay down a base for your popcorn as you view the proceedings, here are some pdf's for you... actual product -- not just opinions flung at you, like dung. all of these were churned out from our "master" z.m.l. file for the mabie book; none of 'em required special handling. > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes007.txt but first, of course, the backdrop... *** remember the old days, when we had delineation between the paper-page-focused pdf vs. screen-reflowable html? yeah, well, maybe not so much, these days. first, designers have increasing shut down "reflowability". web-page-width is increasingly defined in terms of "ems", which means that increasing font-size increases the width. it's also the case that "command-plus" to "increase size" in a web-browser has increasingly come to mean "zoom" the entire page, rather than simply increasing font-size... each of these developments causes the same bad effect: the characters get bigger, but the number of 'em in a line stays the same, because the line itself got longer as well. sometimes to the point where it's longer than the screen, so we again see cases of the dreaded horizontal scrollbar, a horror we thought we'd eliminated about a decade ago. another impacting factor is the new popularity of machines -- like the ipad, and the kindle, and the nook, and so on -- without resizable windows, or windows at all! you get one screensize! that's it! and for iphone and ipad, even when you rotate the screen, the window's _dimensions_ stay the same. (oh, and there is no "increase the fontsize" command on the iphone or the ipad; you are stuck with the designer's specs.) apple is even migrating the "one-app-using-the-full-screen" mentality back to the desktop, with their new version of lion. so the "reflow" aspect of html is steadily being downplayed... *** the other side of the pdf=fixed vs. html=reflowable contrast -- namely that pdf is "a frozen format" -- is one my apps are steadily challenging, with an "on-the-fly" pdf-creation power. if i don't have to just take whatever pdf somebody else created, but can rather generate it to my personal custom specifications regarding pagesize, font, fontsize, leading, and everything else, then pdf as a format has just lost lots of its former deficiencies. don't get me wrong... i've been an enemy of pdf for _so_long_ that i'll never consider it to be an ally, let alone a good friend. but people who've grown up without my prejudiced experiences, who are facing the field of e-books for the very first time, might well come to greatly prefer their _self-customized_ pdf output over the formless blob they get from most e-book viewer-apps. heck, haakon wium lie, one of the godfathers of c.s.s., just did a big press event where he advocated a new method whereby a web-page too big for one screen would be "split" into pages, so users could "swipe" to go forward or back through the pages. > http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20118 457-264/opera-proposal-brings-a-book-look-to-the-web/ he said: > "Doing pages on a screen I think will be very important, > especially for tablets." but, of course, such "pagination" was one of the things that was scorned by the early advocates of html, arguing against the pdf. and if you need the official stamp of the corporate publishers too, "fixed layout" mode is the flavor of the month in the .epub world... along these same lines, there are the book-designers who -- as misguided as they might be -- still keep demanding that _they_ be given the ability to _veto_ any design changes made by users. some of them even want to prohibit us from changing fontsize! but all of them are adamant that pages be displayed as designed. and in addition, all high-profile e-magazines have tended to be simple graphic-file image-flipper apps. (yeah, severely bloated.) that's a darn good way to ensure users can't change your display. of course, there are rather nasty side-effects that come along too. at least you can do a text-search on a pdf! not on a set of images! of course, moving back to pdf, the "classics" app -- the very first e-book app to catch on in the app store, even getting the honor of having their icon shown in an apple commercial, as well as the accompanying bump in sales -- stores its books internally as pdf. and finally, coup de grace, the ibooks app doesn't scroll, does it? heck no, it paginates the book, and you swipe to turn the pages, whereupon you get both a page-curl and a page-turn animation. rip! rap! batman! where did that skeuomorphic crap come from? all i can say is, if you thought the pdf/html delineation was clear, you were wrong, and you're becoming more wrong by the minute. *** fortunately for me, i don't have to go back into that cesspool of "pdf vs. html", because i support both, and let my _users_ decide which one they want, or both (if that's what they choose instead). both pdf and html are just "output formats", far as i'm concerned, and both of them can be generated with one simple button-click. and furthermore, both of 'em are destined for e-book extinction. no one will bother with "generating an output format" which they read in a viewer-program (acrobat or a web-browser) that gives an inferior experience, when they can view the .zml "master file" directly, with a superior app, and without any button-click hassle. not in the long run. not once they've learned the full set of facts. but in the meantime, we'll generate html output, and pdf output. so here are a few pdf files showing the types of output possible, pdfs which demonstrate their direct relationship to html output. *** the "secret" of generating a pdf that seems more like "a website" than a paper-based product is to forget using a fixed pagesize, and instead size each page of the pdf whatever it "needs" to be, depending on the content which you have placed onto that page. here's the first example: > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/pdf-sample01.pdf this pdf consists of _one_page_, which contains the entire book. in this sense, it's equivalent to its single-page web-page cousin: > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes122.html to make the comparison most striking, narrow the html window in your web-browser until it becomes the same width of the pdf. *** here's the second example: > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/pdf-sample02.pdf in this file, each _chapter_ is put onto a separate page in the pdf -- so it's akin to our folder with each chapter on a separate web-page. > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes123-folder.html indeed, each chapter-header in this pdf is an actual _link_ to the web-page in that folder with the respective chapter, so we have an example of the _synergy_ that can be created between the pdf (which can be offline) and the online version. to the extent that "social networking around books" becomes something important -- it's being inflated by hype right now, but it _could_ become big -- this synergy could be quite vital. the best way to view this pdf, to see the intended effect, is the "single page continuous" mode, so each page falls underneath the previous page, creating a display similar to the pdf above... *** and here's a third example: > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/pdf-sample03.pdf in this pdf, each _paragraph_ from the book is on a separate page. and the facing page is completely blank. hey, what's up with that? your first reaction might be that this is stupid, that it's "wasteful", in the sense that many of the paragraphs don't use up a full page. (and that description even ignores that every other page is blank!) but of course that's silly, since these are all just _electrons_, son. furthermore, there are some good use-cases where such a pdf can be quite useful, such as when an editor goes over your book. the blank facing page opposite each paragraph is a place where that editor types in the notes and suggestions for that paragraph. go ahead and try it out... just click in the field, and start typing... then, when you quit, you will be asked if you want to save the file. *** so there you go. three examples of different pdf output files, each geared to a specific use-case, with direct correspondence to an equivalent design rendered in html. indeed, if you view those pdf online, using a web-browser (like chrome or safari, but not firefox, which has a lousy pdf viewing capability), then your experience is _amazingly_ similar to the html equivalent. -bowerbird

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libraries (and taxpayers) being robbed by publishers
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 13 Oct '11

13 Oct '11

i've mentioned this outrage before, but libraries (and taxpayers) are being robbed by publishers... here's a blog post by a librarian: > http://cdstacked.blogspot.com/2011/10/library-journalschool-library-journal… here's a publisher with a "list price" of $35 for an e-book. that's pretty bad, a sign of a publisher that doesn't get it... but hey!, amazon offers it at a "bargain" price of just $24. and you can get it even cheaper at the sony store, for $19. yep, $19 (or more) for a file that costs 0 cents to reproduce. that makes a lot of sense, yes it does, a whole lot of sense... but just be glad that you ain't a library, little miss sunshine. because if you were, this same e-book would cost you $105. no, that's not a typo. one hundred and five dollars, american. remember this tidbit the next time you hear publishers whine. -bowerbird

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stop bickering and just go build it for marcello
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 12 Oct '11

12 Oct '11

marcello said: > My vision is > to have every gadget on this earth > sold preloaded with a corpus of > the world's finest literature, > in all languages. what a magnificent vision you have there, mr. marcello. it is compelling and unique, and you are truly a pioneer, a patron of the arts with a finely-honed aesthetic sense, and a humanitarian whose greatest desire is _to_serve_. no wonder this project gutenberg, which you have built, is so stellar, with such a fine and remarkable reputation. i'm not sure why these peons seem to believe that they can challenge the policies which you've clearly dictated. after all, it was you who wrote the code, and gathered the volunteers, and -- most of all -- _had_the_vision_. we should be grateful for your singular wonderfulness, stand in awe of our luck at being your contemporaries, and then buckle down so your _vision_ becomes _reality_. -bowerbird

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the art of the book -- #02
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 11 Oct '11

11 Oct '11

ok, back to some real work... p3 has finished with "the art of the book". (proofing goes _fast_ at d.p. it's formatting, and then especially post-processing, that bogs down.) again, this book consists of roughly 2500 lines... ~500 were changed by p1, then ~100 by p2, and now roughly another ~100 were changed by p3... while this p3 count is _much_ higher than normal, reviews of the diffs show that most of the changes were on captions, which were typeset as all-upper. o.c.r. is notoriously bad on words in all-uppercase. so any post-processor would know that those lines needed to be checked closely anyway, so it probably doesn't matter if that close check is done during p3 or during post-processing. in fact, since p3 people just "leave a note" instead of _deciding_ the matter, it's probably less efficient to have p3 leaving a note. this is especially true if you consider the likelihood is high that _both_ p3 and the post-processor will do the "close check", and thus duplicate the effort... but again, this thread isn't aimed at d.p. efficiency. here are 2 actual _errors_ that were caught by p3. > Home has designed three founts, all of them > Horne has designed three founts, all of them > so rich. Characteristic or his art is the headpiece > so rich. Characteristic of his art is the headpiece those were the _only_ o.c.r. word errors that p3 found, as far as i can tell. they caught punctuation errors too, but i didn't think to count them. but all in all, i'd say they probably caught a couple dozen errors p2 didn't... here's a place where p2 corrected a printing-error, but then p3 reversed that, _reinserting_ the printing-error, and then "left a note" that there was a printing-error. > It has been acquired > I thas[**It has] been acquired that probably seems silly to you... i'd guess it was done so the post-processor could note the change. ("note: a printer's error was corrected on page 206.") i've always found such notes to be counterproductive. ("why did you waste my time telling me that you fixed an obvious error? inform me if you _don't_ fix them.") in general, my opinion is that these _notes_ are bad. it takes time to _insert_ them into the text, and then it takes time to _remove_ them later. that's stupid... one of the innovations that roger tested on his site was _separation_ of the notes outside the text itself. he found that it worked well, saving time and energy, and providing general improvements to the product. of course, as it was with all of his findings, the d.p. "powers-that-be" chose simply to ignore it totally... *** oh yes, sorry to keep you hanging, p3 _did_ find and fix those 2 spacey doublequotes, so kudos to them for that. *** anyway... because of the large number of all-uppercase captions in this book, which we know require individual attention, this book probably is not a good candidate for my system. every system will do equally well (or badly) if you're gonna have to look at each line individually. don't need a system. my system _would_ do a good job on the hundreds of pages in this book which do _not_ have all-upper captions on 'em. many full pages went through all _3_ of the proofing rounds without a single character being changed on the whole page, so that was a bunch of time and attention essentially wasted. any system which focuses attention where it is _needed_ will be able to have a cost-benefit efficiency that is much better. -bowerbird

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well, that was certainly amusing
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 11 Oct '11

11 Oct '11

oh yeah, that was a blast... marcello, a leader of men, an italian who works in germany, will build a new (and improved!) d.p. now _that_ i gotta see... and he thinks he can still point to the "fan site" he built for me, even though he was defeated, totally, in that he had to adopt light-markup... (besides, when is he going to update that site? practically nothing there from the last 5 years.) and not to be outdone, lee passey chimes in too, and repeats some of his tripe from the old days... hey, it's like it was old-home week, or something. someone musta issued a call for a class-reunion! *** now that michael hart has passed away, you can look for marcello to make a _lot_ of new moves, trying to grab power and control of this library... i'm gonna egg him on, because i would _enjoy_ seeing this library _fail_ after michael's death, because the technocrats came in and ruined it... -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] the art of the book -- #01
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 11 Oct '11

11 Oct '11

jim said: > To me the real "interesting" thing is > to take a good hard look at P3 and ask > if and when the changes made there > actually represent "fixes" or if they > represent "divergences" -- i.e. are the > P3 changes actually making things worse? well, jim, everyone knows that _sometimes_ a change made by p3 cannot be considered as a "fix" in any sense of the word, since it raises a question instead of giving an answer. sometimes that's productive. sometimes not. but that's not the point of this thread, jim... this thread is one i might decide to pursue if "the art of the book" looks like a book that would be instructive in terms of evaluating the system that i would build based on the lessons taught in the "sweet grapes" thread. i learned some time back that it was useless to discuss d.p. failings, because the powers over there have no interest in improvement. so let's stay on-topic here, ok? -bowerbird p.s. geez, i wrote this last night, intending to send it out this morning, but now i see there has been an explosion of posts since, including by many people in my kill-filter... so i have to decide if i want to wade through that mess, or if i don't wanna waste my time.

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Re: [gutvol-d] Build our own DP, anybody?
by hmonroe.pglaf＠huntermonroe.com 11 Oct '11

11 Oct '11

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Re: [gutvol-d] some questions for brewster kahle and archive.org
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 11 Oct '11

11 Oct '11

alex said: > People at the archive seem vaguely interested, i think you probably mean to say they feigned interest. > but not as much as I'd have hoped. which is exactly what i predicted the reaction would be. > Basically, it's "my project" to > manage and "sell" to the upper folx. well, that all by itself says that you're a volunteer... if you were a paid employee, they wouldn't let you "waste" time on such a "frivolous" venture as this... > I suppose we'll see where that goes. which i take it is your code for "it ain't goin' nowhere"... and how could it? if the middle-management people won't even touch it, do you really think you could sell it to "the upper folx"? yeah, good luck with that... especially since this attitude _began_ at the very top... no, brewster isn't stupid, like those mid-level people. it's fairly rare to be stupid and yet get as rich as he is, unless you become a right-wing-radio-talk-show-host. but he's also a practical guy, which does sync with "rich". so i know exactly how and why (and even _when_) he came to his current position on the (lack of) value of digital text. in 2003, when michael hart celebrated p.g. e-text #10000, he did that in san francisco, at the internet archive offices... i went, to join in, and saw their newly-launched operations. one of the things they demonstrated was print-on-demand, the machine they were driving around in their "library van"... i took a look at some of the books they were printing, and soon spotted some errors. i remember one in particular... they had inadvertently dropped a blank page from a book -- because the o.c.r. had recognized no text there, d'uh -- but that meant that the recto/verso ordering got thrown off, and even-numbered pages were suddenly on the right side. that's never a good sign if you're trying to "clone" a p-book. when i brought this up, i could see that it was the straw that broke the camel's back. brewster related how difficult it was, in time and energy, to turn o.c.r. into a finished print pocket, and he bemoaned his ever-growing impression that it would make book-scanning a task that was impossibly expensive... so later on, when he talked about being favorably impressed with a "book-flipper" demonstration at the british museum -- a technology that utilized _pagescans_, not digital text -- i got the very strong feeling he'd choose that route instead... at the #10000 celebration, and several times since, people tried to impress on brewster the importance of digital text, in terms of its flexibility and its small resource foot-print. heck, sometimes _one_ pagescan requires more space than the _entire_ book uses if you store it as digital text instead. plus you can reflow it, and search it, and edit it, and so on. but he'd been scarred by those early experiences of people (who, to tell you the truth, were simply out of their league, and thus incompetent in terms of doing the job correctly) to work efficiently with digital text. plus, brewster lives in a cocoon where disk-space and bandwidth are _unlimited_, so a small resource foot-print is largely meaningless to him. what all of this means is that the basic archive.org approach -- utilizing pagescans in a "book-flipper" viewer-program -- was set rather early on, and has determined their world-view. thus, when the hard cold reality of mobile machines which are severely resource-constrained hit the internet archive, they were unprepared for the winter, and got snowed in... their focus on the pagescans does them no good right now. but they're incapable of shifting their focus to another place. all of this is to say, alex, that i don't think you're gonna have very much luck getting anyone at archive.org to place much value -- if any at all -- on the accuracy of their digital text. as long as it's "good enough for search purposes", it's fine... (i put that phrase in quotes because it seems stupid to me, probably because i expect computer-search to be accurate; but evidently some people think that 92% is "good enough".) now, alex, that's from a more-or-less "objective" standpoint. however, when i add in the fact that i have been _abused_by_ those mid-level people over at internet archive, i can tell you that i have absolutely zero interest in doing _any_ work that might benefit them, no matter how indirect that benefit is... those people aren't going to give me full credit for what i do. heck, they aren't even gonna share _any_ credit they receive! on the contrary, they'll do everything they can to make sure that i don't get _any_ credit, no matter how much work i do... i _love_ the internet archive in general. but those mid-level people there were assholes to me, they were total assholes... so, um, no, alex, i'm not interested in doing anything with you that would be housed at, or based within, the internet archive. i'm sorry 'bout that, but i trust you understand my explanation. i will be setting up a demonstration of an online proofing site, one geared toward taking a book from o.c.r. to e-book output, in the fashion that i just laid out in my recent series of lessons. my site will use content from the internet.archive, or course, and other sites as well, but it will be completely independent. if you'd like to work with me on my site, alex, that'd be fine... i'm not _asking_ for help from anyone, and i won't _need_ it, but i have no reason to turn anyone down who wants to help. even if they're from the internet archive... ;+) -bowerbird

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