Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
personally, i think _all_ the time people have spent over there making hand-tooled .html versions has been a big waste of energy; it would've been far smarter to perfect a text-to-html conversion routine instead...
It would have been smarter to do them in TEI, but everything takes time to develop. As of today, the TEI people started churning out books, whereas we are still waiting for your much-announced all singing all dancing Wunderkind reader program.
one more thing: are we assured that the conversion routine is solid? or are "repostings" going to start happening with greater frequency? if you have to repost every separate variation from every .tei e-text every time the converter is changed, you could be doing that all day.
Who says you have to repost anything if the converter changes? You have to repost if you want to fix errors in the text. And fixing *one* text manually and regenerating the others is faster than fixing 3 texts manually.
... to wonder why each of these variant files needs to be put in the library at all, if users will truly be able to generate them at will.
Because we start in a more conventional way: we post all pre-generated versions of the files along the TEI file. So if the converter should break, we can go back to a process of manually editing all posted files, like of old.
which _is_ still the plan, isn't it? that they can generate them at will? setting all of their own options, in a simple way with a friendly interface? when do we get to see that part of the puzzle?
When the conversion process is deemed stable and we have got enough server-power to let thousands of people play with the options.
and will marcello be telling people they can't have the font of their choice because p.g. "doesn't have a license to distribute it"? that would be a real bummer.
Of course I will tell people they cannot download a font which we cannot legally distribute. If they want that, they can buy the font and generate the PDF at home. Or they could simply get the HTML version, which takes the font from the browser settings.
i caught this one because it had a black-on-white visible manifestation,
Pray tell, what *is* a "black-on-white visible manifestation"? Do you see such things often? -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org