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