got a new version of huck finn up...          :+)

>   http://zenmagiclove.com/huckf/wisdom.py
>   http://zenmagiclove.com/huckf/huckf-004.zml

it's getting really clean now.  time to splice in the italics.

i used a brain-deadish approach with the aux dictionary,
partly because i wondered how difficult it would make it,
which was _not_ a smart decision to make with this book,
and all the funny spellings twain used for the "dialects"...

i left a few really bad pages, so you could see the horror.

>   page 67-73
>  page 111-114
>  page 151
>  page 182
>  page 202

lots of words flagged in red on those pages...

(at any rate, with the words almost fully correct, and
reflecting a very close relationship to the actual scans,
what with retaining page-breaks, line-breaks, and even
end-line-hyphenates, this particular version of the file
is quite close to the type of file jon hurst was suggesting.
of course, it's silly not to mark the italics.  i'm just sayin'.)

***

here's the version of huck finn that i'm using:

>   http://archive.org/details/adventureshuckle00twaiiala

that's the version that has been downloaded most often
-- some 14,508 times, according to their listed figure --
and it's also the one which they themselves used for their
first demo of their online web-based scan-flip program,
for which brewster had been lusting since the first time
he saw a similar program running in the british museum.

and -- as fate would have it -- it is also a version which
has lost its em-dashes from its o.c.r. file, i'm sad to say.
(meaning i had to scrape the text from the abbyy.gz file.)

>   https://ia600506.us.archive.org/5/items/adventureshuckle00twaiiala/adventureshuckle00twaiiala_djvu.txt

that's right, its most prominent version of "huck finn" is
fatally flawed, and nobody cared, or even noticed much.

(yet another demonstration that normal people don't even
need full clean digital text of a book.  which is not to say
that society wouldn't benefit by having a complete library
of clean digital books; but "society" isn't too willing to pay
for such an asset, so i guess we don't really _deserve_ it.)

but in spite of my own general preference for digital text,
i will admit that the archive.org book-flipper is awesome.

>   http://archive.org/stream/adventureshuckle00twaiiala#page/122/mode/2up

indeed, on an ipad with good wifi, it's a great experience.
you can have a 2-up page-spread view, which is nice, _or_
switch over to single-page display if you want bigger text.

and, with this huck finn, you get all the great illustrations,
plus the lovely design with its rustic olden-dayes feel to it.

***

anyway, i wanted a little more than book-flipper offered
(such as the ability to save the scan-files to my own site),
so i did a primitive-but-with-special-tricks version of it:

>   http://zenmagiclove.com/scanarchiveorg.py

buttons at top-left switch between "huck" and "mcguff"...
the "huck" scans are pulled from my site, but the "mcguff"
ones are called from archive.org, so you might notice that
the page-numbers are incorrect, because archive.org was
not smart enough to put page-numbers in its scan names.
(the stupidity that i have to deal with is so mind-boggling.)

this special-tricks app will be very useful to me long-run...

***

more later.  because you don't get enough torture...   :+)

-bowerbird