I'll reply to three different fellow PG'ers here... bowerbird said:
but even if p.g. doesn't want the list you'd make -- and i can't see why they would turn it down -- i'm sure plenty of people would find it useful...
so go ahead! :+)
i'd suggest a wiki, though, so other people could augment it.
My thoughts exactly! (Is it a bad sign if I'm thinking the same as bowerbird?) Actually, there is a wiki on the PG website now, as Marcello announced here not long ago, and this is one of the I've had that I've put on a list of possible uses to make of it. David Starner said:
It's not just glamarous, it's hard. You have to go through all the work of finding a specific edition that may not be well-identified in the ebook. You have to dump the text in such a way that doesn't lose all the formatting information, which may range from easy to hard, but will certainly require custom code and massaging. You have to work with a text that is unlikely to be the quality of what DP can produce after five rounds, and could turn out to be pretty bad. And it requires some tedious comparison. I'd actually rather rescan and reprocess and compare after a lot of times rather than try and reformat existing material.
You're right. I've gone through a process like this perhaps 25 times in reformatting a text for PG, and I think almost every time it's ended up being a bigger job than I had intended. And yet, I keep seeing more material that has had a lot of effort put into it already, and may disappear some year, if not put into PG. Joshua Hutchinson said:
I'm currently finishing up a raid of the English texts on reference.bahai.org (I'm scared of the Arabic and Persian originals/translations ;) ). When I'm done with that, I'd love to have a new site to raid. If you have a site or two you want to send my way, I'll look into clearances and raiding their text.
How about some Russian? <g> Now that I'm able to recognize letters of the cyrillic alphabet, I've discussed with a Russian-speaking DP volunteer the possibility of adapting some of the classics texts from from lib.ru (My local university library has a surprising amount of pre-1923 volumes in Russian, including complete Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, et al.) Andrew