In a message dated 10/19/2004 12:16:07 AM Mountain Standard Time, Bowerbird@aol.com writes: Doing fully automatic convertion to good paged PDFs for
printing nice copies (and I mean good, as different from workable) will probably always remain a dream
This is A goal. It is not, and cannot be, THE goal. It would be great to have everything in printable PDF for people who want printable PDF. If you want to keep ten thousand books on your computer, printable PDF isn't worth the end product of bovine digestion. I loathe PDF. I'm sure I'm not the only person who uses Gutenberg who is in my situation: I'm going blind--slowly, fortunately, unlike a neighbor who went blind overnight--and I can't get PDF documents on my Rocket, which means that as my vision continues to deteriorate I'm going to have to read sitting in front of my computer if I want to read something that is not available in a format I can convert to text or HTML in order to convert it to Rocket. I agree with Michael. Post everything in TXT first AND THEN do anything else you want to do with it. I believe that is one of the goals of of the DP team, which has all the scanned pages on computer to work from. HTML, even the "Save As" kind of HTML, can maintain formatting if you tell it to; I know because I've done it often. A basic problem in this entire discussion is that there are a lot of people here who are program-happy, as opposed to computer-happy. I'm computer- happy, but like the vast majority of people who use Gutenberg, I'm really not interested in umpteen different programs. I just want a book I can read. As a scholar, I might at times need the specific coding which will tell me what used this punctuation mark or that whatever that doesn't come across on txt, but if I need that, I can obtain the book someway and reinsert the punctuation and formatting and whatever. The village schoolmaster in a third world village, who has two hours of electricity a day, one cellular phone for the entire village, and an obsolete laptop donated to him by a first world company with a connection from the phone to the laptop cobbled together by a gadget-minded Peace Corps volunteer or church or UN aid worker, doesn't give a squiddly about umlauts and grave accents. He just wants BOOKS that he can READ to his students during the two hours a day that the electricity is on. The cowboy who's going to be stuck all winter in a back-country cabin looking after a herd of cattle in a snowed-in high pasture, or the astronaut, or the submariner, or the scientists in a South Pole research station, or the kids going to bush- school on the radio in Australia or Alaska--these people don't need pretty pages. THEY NEED BOOKS. They need good books. That's all. If we go back to the very basics, this is the goal of Project Gutenberg. It is no mistake that the very first things Michael posted were the most important documents of freedom. An educated populace can be kept enslaved for only so long, and then the privy hits the fan. We are the world's free public library. We do not serve, nor do we even NEED to serve, the few people in elite professions who want, and need, to be able to account for every comma and every umlaut. People who are arguing their heads off about ten different ways to format are losing sight of the goal. It is hard to remember that your goal was draining the swamp if you are up to your a** in alligators. Stop creating alligators. If YOU--whoever YOU happens to be--want to create all kinds of pretty formats, do it. That's grand. But don't try to inflict your vision on all of PGLAF. The TXT versions MUST come first. Then people can be joyfully reading the new books, while other people create other formats for those nice new books. Now can we go back to draining the swamp? Notice I said "can," not "may." We Ph.D.s in English know our grammar. I MEANT "can." Anne