the d.p. foundation board had a meeting recently.

the general manager:
>   was unanimously re-affirmed for a period of
>   two years, ending 12/31/2013;

it's good to know that everything's going great at d.p.

stay the course!


she was also charged with this:
>   The GM will collaborate with volunteers to
>   produce a draft of Best Practices for HTML versions
>   of our e-texts which will, by their nature,
>   facilitate better conversion to ePub format.

so i guess you guys here don't need to bother with that,
since it's being covered over there...

***

unless, of course, you guys are having fun with all your
complex discussions of unnecessarily complicated stuff.

i hope so.

masochists and sadists always seem to find each other...

but for everyone else...

***

the time is right now.  we have come to a fork in the road.

you can take that tortured path of those sadomasochists.

or you can come with me on the sweet path of simplicity.

***

here is an extremely brief recap of what i've done:

1.  i studied books to survey features they contained.
2.  i created zen markup language to tag the features.
3.  i edited a test-suite which contains those features.
4.  i wrote code to convert the test-suite into e-books.

so, the "master" file is z.m.l. -- a light-markup format
which is so simple a 4th-grader can understand it --
and all of the other formats (including plain old .html)
are generated from that .zml master, via a button-click.

there's even an authoring-tool, so you can verify that
your book is being handled correctly _as_you_write_it_.

this is the simple fork, folks.  this is the way it should be.

***

so, i generated the .mobi and .epub from the test-suite.

the e-book output is basically correct, as far as i know,
but the formatting needs some rough edges smoothed.
(actually, i didn't even look at it, but i assume that's so.)

if anyone has criticism in that regard, i'd love to hear it.

(don't even have to be "constructive" criticism, although
any attempts to put me on a merry-go-round will _fail_.)

i am shifting my focus -- from old books to new ones,
born digital, from the self-publishers of the future --
but cloning these public-domain books is easy enough,
so my system should work just fine for your purposes...

***

here's the test-suite:
>   http://zenmagiclove.com/test-suite-2012.txt

here's the script that converts the test-suite into .html:
>   http://zenmagiclove.com/cgi-bin/t2.py

here's the .mobi version of the test-suite:
>   http://zenmagiclove.com/suite/suite.mobi

here's the .epub version of the test-suite:
>   http://zenmagiclove.com/suite/suite-epub.epub

here's the folder holding all of the conversion files:
>   http://zenmagiclove.com/suite/

here's a .zip file containing all of the conversion files:
>   http://zenmagiclove.com/suite/suite-all.zip

***

you're now at a fork in the road.  which way do you go?

-bowerbird