lee said:
> I didn't want to clutter up the mailing list with
> files that probably only BowerBird is interested in,
> so I sent them to him back channel.
never got 'em. and yes, i looked in my spam folder,
because that's where your posts go, automatically...
(you know, that kill-filter thing.)
but that's ok, i don't really need the files. seriously.
i'd much rather have you provide people with a primer
on them, as well as some easy-to-understand templates,
since -- if you will remember -- you had _criticized_
my unwillingness to provide source-code that would
create such files. if i could've shown that source-code
without giving too much information to the people here
who have made me their "enemy", i certainly would have.
so that's why i did not. but if you would be willing to do
some tutoring of them, so i knew that they were actually
in possession of the same knowledge that i already have,
then i _might_ be willing to part with my source-code...
or, ya know, you can always give 'em _your_ source-code.
which they could turn into perl or python. (yeah, right.)
> You see, I cheated.
well, what you did wasn't really "cheating", but...
> ePubEditor is not a tool that is used to take
> simple text files and convert them to HTML.
...that was pretty much what i wanted you to admit.
because without .html, one cannot make an .epub.
so your "epubeditor" cannot _create_ a new .epub
-- at least not using a text-file as its input-file --
it can only _edit_ an existing .epub or .html, right?
so it's not as useful or powerful as we might have
reasonably expected, given the name of the app...
and certainly not very useful to the d.p. people...
i'm not saying it's useless. it still has a purpose...
but turning plain-text into .html is "the hard part".
after that, it's just generating some metadata files.
> There are other programs out there
> which do that at least as well as I could
well, maybe you under-rate your own skills, lee,
since many of those "other programs out there"
get thumbs-down from most e-book-designers,
since the .html they create is considered crappy.
_you_ wouldn't turn out crappy .html, would you?
> (not the least of which is FineReader itself).
well, first of all, not everyone owns finereader.
more importantly, it is one of those programs
that creates .html that e-book-designers hate.
just so you know...
> ePubEditor's "CreateNCX" function relies on
> the existence of an Table of Contents made
> up of one or more lists, optionally nested.
so if a person makes an .html table of contents,
your program can create an .ncx version from it.
that's better than nothing, to be sure, but it
would be even better if it could create _both_.
(and yes, i see where you later noted that it can
create both, provided the person has marked up
their .html file appropriately, but all that is just
resetting the place where you put responsibility
on the person, rather than having the tool do it.)
> This file may be created by hand, and in the
> case of small works it is trivially easy to do so.
um, yeah, but isn't it the "trivially easy" tasks that
we want our computers to be performing _for_ us?
just sayin'...
> I have no idea why IA didn't OCR this page as well
they did... but their quality-assessment routines said
the results were too shabby to use, so they substituted
the page-scan instead... not ideal, but understandable.
they would sub in every page this way, if they could, but
the e-book would be too bloated to do anyone any good.
> Referring to the image I was able to create
> an HTML TOC in about 15 minutes
i really didn't mean for you to go to all of that work.
i'm sorry now that i asked... it won't happen again...
oh, and you kids out there, don't try this at home!
if you want to _create_ and/or _edit_ an .epub file,
your best bet is with "sigil" -- a free/free program
that behaves quite like a regular word-processor,
and then saves its files in .epub format. sigil does
a bang-up job of creating your .opf and .ncx files
_for_ you, based on the text that you have entered
(or retrieved from an o.c.r. file), all _automatically_.
(although it also lets you go in and edit manually.)
there are other .epub creators out there nowadays,
including "legend maker", but that one costs $40,
so why not just go with the free/free "sigil" instead?
and remember, if you want .pdf and .kindle as well,
you'll be able to get that from my "jaguar" editor...
it's _not_ open-source free, but _is_ cost-free free.
> In the case of the "Art of the Book", there were
> not headers marked. In fact, every block of text
> was marked as though it were a paragraph.
welcome to the second-biggest book-scanning operation
on the entire planet, lee. and yes, we're in deep doo-doo.
> (If you're going to call everything a paragraph,
> why add any markup at all?
because you can't make an .epub without having markup.
but nobody said that the markup needed to be any good!
that was one of the things you "forgot" to put in the spec.
> It makes no sense.
on the contrary, if you need to be able to "offer .epubs",
it makes perfect sense. it's the only thing you _can_ do.
> a division of the text that has no content?
> I'm beginning to think the people at Internet Archive
> simply don't understand how to use HTML.
surely you must be mistaken, lee. and _badly_ mistaken.
the internet archive is one of the _leading_authorities_ on
"books in browsers". indeed, they run a yearly conference
with that very title. and -- as a matter of fact, since i have
just mentioned their yearly conference -- i should tell you
that this year's version is actually being held _very_ soon!
here, let me google that for you... ok, yes, it's next week:
> http://bib.archive.org/
and lee, one of the "themes" of the event is "beautiful books".
which introduces me to a post i was going to make next week,
but will probably make today, now that i stole my own thunder.
anyway, lee, good luck with the app. when you have the mods
necessary so it can run in toto on a mac, please let me know...
(i got it to execute ok, and could do some things, but not all.)
-bowerbird