On Tue, January 31, 2012 10:29 am, Jim Adcock wrote:
BB>hand-crafted versions are simply impossible to keep up-to-date.
I'm not sure I understand this passionately held opinion. OCRs of books have a *finite* number of scannos which need to be "hand-crafted" to remove those scannos.
You and the Bower Bird are talking past each other, not with each other. Imagine a scenario where someone OCRs a book and goes through by hand and carefully fixes any errors caused by the OCR process. Now imagine a scenario where someone takes that file which was carefully made by hand in scenario one and crafts it by hand into a /new/ file adding specific markup, and removing other markup, with the express purpose of making it most presentable on Acme corporation's MyPad reader. When BB talks of "hand-crafted" versions he is speaking of the second of these activities, not the first. The first activity creates the master, and the second activity creates a "snowflake" which attempt to preserve everything good about the master but with some unique aspects. If you see a bad Kindle "snowflake," and fix it (creating Yet Another Snowflake), you have done nothing to fix what might be the same error in any other "snowflake." OTOH, if all the "snowflakes" are derived programmatically from a single master, a fix to the master will automatically propagate to them all. If you choose, you may continue to intentionally misunderstand what BB is trying to say, insisting that he use your vocabulary instead of his own, but in doing so you won't be contributing to anyone else's understanding of the problems. It seems that your basic contention is that the automatic creation of derivative formats from a single master format is simply not possible. Fair enough, this kind of defeatism is common, and sometimes even accurate. The evidence you offer for this belief is that Mr. Perathoner's processes don't do their intended job well. My belief is that even if your proffered "evidence" is correct, the failure of one attempt does not prove that it is impossible. I still believe, perhaps naïvely, that a single master format can be created from which all other formats can be successfully derived without any hand-tweaking at all. So I would say that you should continue to lobby PG for your "snowdrift" repository. Just don't berate others simply because they are not interested in solving /your/ problem.