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Re: time after time
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Feb '11

28 Feb '11

one more thing, while we're on the kindle... > http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/02/free_kindle_thi.php -bowerbird

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Rome is still burning!
by John Redmond 28 Feb '11

28 Feb '11

I am reassured to discover that I am not the only one turned off by the tedious and reiterative banter of the Usual Suspects. Let me state my views: 1. XML should be at the centre of any text management (doh). 2. There should be one or more markup schemes for simple embellishment of text to trivialise conversion of existing text to XML. One of these MAY be zml, or my dottedfile format--or any other system that others prefer. The only requirement should be the easy conversion to good XML. 3. Given that we share a primary interest in books (text), it makes sense that the XML should conform to the XHTML doctype. 4. From that point on, (X)HTML and HTML/ePub are trivial to generate, while LaTeX and PDF come from XSLT--which is surprisingly easy. I am not trying to patronise--and I know full well that none of this is new. But I want to emphasise how practicable the approach is. I refer to my site (http://www.limpidsoft.com) which now has 60 books derived from PG source, generated in my spare time over the course of a few weeks. It will be immediately obvious that few of these books are perfect: bad page breaks will leap out from some of the PDFs and BB will just HATE the CSS. As any user of LaTeX will know, it is just a matter of hand-polishing the intermediate LaTeX files before the final conversion to PDFs. And I will eventually do this to the current files. At this point, though, I am satisfied that large-scale styling from PG text source IS practicable. SO, if PG were to establish and maintain canonical XML texts, would it not be future-proofed? John Redmond

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Re: Kindle passwords
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Feb '11

28 Feb '11

michael said: > "gutmagic" > ... > should be the very first thing > anyone tries out on their Kindle > ... > Whatever I can do to encourage this. . . > please let me know. . . . > .. > Wow!!! i'll say wow. why didn't you support jim when he came here 2 years ago -- look at the date on that catalog -- and asked for that support? he got a cold shoulder, which is why he went and mounted it on his own site. and i volunteered to write an app like this years ago, and got the same cold shoulder. now you say "wow". but hey, congratulations for waking up. :+) -bowerbird p.s. you just now got around to trying out a kindle?

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Re: time after time
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Feb '11

28 Feb '11

keith said: > I honestly, thought that you were > serious about creating a useful tool, > but I must sadly admit you are not what? you cannot see how a tool that turns a plain-text file into .html and .epub and .mobi would be _useful_ to p.g., d.p., and the world at large? seriously? are you daft? because i can assure you that _some_ people have no trouble at all seeing it. no trouble. at all. meanwhile, p.g. (as run by marcello) stumbles along trying to make r.s.t. (1) work, and (2) acceptable to d.p. > It is very sad. A very poor joke. > It, also shows that you have no real interest > in helping the PG community in any way. the p.g. community? you mean the people who insulted me for years on this listserve, and attacked me viciously in a wolf-pack? _that_ community? including the marcello, who put up a _website_ trying to spite me? (little did he know how badly all that would backfire when he had to eat his words and adopt light markup, _proving_ i was right! ironic that he saved all my i-told-you-so's. next he'll probably sic the paparazzi on me.) in case there is any doubt left in your mind, let me assure you that i have zero interest in "helping" _that_ particular community... i'm quite sure there are some good people here, but that vicious attack-pack sure shut them up... > Nor due do you have any respect for the PG cause! i paid my due respect to p.g. for _many_ years, and i continue to serve the cause of electronic-books, and i have zero need for your assessment of that... so, are we clear on _that_ too? but cheer up, keith! nothing to be sad about! :+) -bowerbird

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Remastered versions of generated epubs
by Robert Gibbins 28 Feb '11

28 Feb '11

A few weeks ago, I appended to this forum asking if PG was interested in hosting hand-crafted epubs. Such replies as I received suggested that this was not BAU for PG at the moment. So, although I would rather have offered them to PG, I have just added 6 of these to the MobileRead website. I have retained the PG branding and credited the volunteers who produced the originals - please let me know if you think this is breaking the license terms, I can easily anonymise them. The intention of remastering is simply to make the books easier to read on an inherently limited portable e-reader. (I haven't knowingly made any decisions of taste as I have no ambition to be a book designer or typographer.) The remastering includes: - breaking the xhtml up into smaller files (one per chapter plus one each for front and back matter. - paginating the front and back matter into title page, edition notice, contents, etc. - cleaning up the existing hyperlinks, where necessary. - adding some hyperlinks (at chapter heads)- you might disagree with doing this, I haven't entirely made up my mind myself. - toning down some of the markup (font sizes and margins) to better fit onto the limited size of an e-reader screen. - changing some of the markup to be more scalable and reflowable (usually by expressing font sizes, margins, offsets, etc in what I hope are more scalable units). If you have any comments on whether the remastered books are either more or less readable than the generated originals, please append either to this forum or to the MobileRead threads documented below. I'm particularly interested in what does or doesn't work on particular devices as I have only one device (a Sony Reader) on which to test the books. The books are: - The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall - PG969 - Anne Bronte - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122349 - Almayer's Folly - PG720 - Joseph Conrad - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122348 - The Portrait Of A Lady - PG2833 & PG2834 - Henry James - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122346 - The History Of Henry Esmond - PG2511 - William Makepeace Thackeray - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122345 - The Belton Estate - PG4969 - Anthony Trollope - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=119515 - Ayala's Angel - PG33500 - Anthony Trollope - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122337 (I also have 3 other books I've worked on: - Persuasion - Jane Austen - The Forsyte Saga complete - John Galsworthy - The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas pere but I haven't added them to MobileRead because there are already versions of the books there.) Bob Gibbins

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Re: time after time
by Morasch＠aol.com 27 Feb '11

27 Feb '11

> i await your suggestions... more cowbell!

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Calibre: Open Source Software for Managing eBook Collections
by Michael S. Hart 27 Feb '11

27 Feb '11

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/calibre-revisited/30407 ". . .Calibre allows you to convert content from various internet sources such as Project Gutenberg into the appropriate format for your e-reader, whether it is a Kindle, a Nook, a Sony, or something else."

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Re: time after time
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Feb '11

27 Feb '11

"and the wheels on the bus go round and round..." sunday's version is up: > http://76.74.254.239/~bowerbird/a.fcgi .pdf code almost fully incorporated, _except_ for problems with short/blank pages at chapter-end. more generally, widows/orphans exist throughout. more improvements for the fixed-width of the ipad, but again here, other operational problems persist... i await your suggestions... *** by the end of this year, writers will be using a variety of book-creation tools -- web-based and offline -- which make it easy to spin out the main formats in use today... and everybody will shake their heads and wonder why in the world you people here thought it was so difficult. i guess you will drag out the t.e.i. manual to show them. -bowerbird

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Re: time after time
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Feb '11

27 Feb '11

saturday's version is up: > http://76.74.254.239/~bowerbird/a.fcgi changes made to accommodate the ipad's fixed-size viewport. more work needs to be done in that regard, but the changes should solve the resize-window-to-refresh display problems that've been observed in the web-browser version up to now. *** michael said: > we will not anoint any author of any markup language > as "King" at the expense of all other efforts. well, gee, michael, that's what you've been saying all along... but _someone_ at p.g. -- maybe while you weren't looking? -- has recently blessed restructured-text as an accepted format. meanwhile, far as i can tell, other markup-language formats would still be kicked back as "unacceptable", exactly like r.s.t. woulda been "unacceptable" right up until a few months ago... so _something_ has changed... whether you like it or not... -bowerbird

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Re: time after time
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 26 Feb '11

26 Feb '11

more good news! i did some testing, and it appears that my web-app _can_ jump to an internal anchor when displaying an .html file... so jana will get her wish about that, for search functionality. i don't know if this is a recent twist from the compiler boys, or if i had my head up my ass all along, but whatever the case, i'm happy to make my collaborators happy. you can look for that development sometime next week... -bowerbird p.s. wha...? john, html is no "backwater". been under a rock? not heard about html5? xhtml is the entity being abandoned, because in spite of a bunch of attention, it was unworkable... even .epub is trying to catch up. (google for epub liza html5.)

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