Whoa there. Clearly I walked into a minefield and feel in imminent danger of having various limbs blasted from my poor undeserving corpus. Let me state my point of view or why I made the offer and why I think perhaps trees and forests may be getting a little confused. Now I'm new to this stuff and many of you good folks have labored for years so if I lay a few mines of my own - so be it. 1. The primary reason for my offer was simply that since I found the simple text version unpleasant to read I thought there may be others and that having a choice of formats available may make the output - the books - more approachable hence reach a wider audience and all the good things that must flow from that. Seems to me this is that GP is about - outreach. 2. I fully understand the issue of editable text. and rampant variations - a maintenance nightmare. Untenable. So let me address the issue of maintenance and incidentally why I do not think that my offer need cause the end of the world as we know it. There are two parts to this argument: 1. The basic format that I have converted to is OpenOffice 's XML format from which multiple conversions - PDF and MS doc if you want - are derived. . All essentially driven from a set of DTD's. My brief reading of TEI is that it too uses an XML base. So we have a trivial level of commonality as a starting point. By looking at the conversion processes we could have a WSYIWYG editor off-the-shelf at $0 cost with output convertible to TEI output by driving it through appropriate XLST's and all that good stuff. OpenOffice has a pilot development with DocBook to do something similar. It is not making much progress but with the right effort it could. 2. The second point relates to the difficulty, of success possibility, of conversion. I used 4 styles in the book. Header 1, paragraph, page header and page footer (the last two could be easily removed but are tactically useful because of page numbering). For a simple text book I see no reason to use any more and the cost of replacement of header /footer with an alternate implementation is trivial in the extreme. Hard pagination is perhaps a bit more difficult to handle and I'm not sure I should have done it but in the absence of any instructions/suggestions to the contrary I did. So a set of simple rules in the period before an idealized solution is available would significantly reduce difficulties. Now whether TEI is better than DocBook or a converged OASIS standard is not for me to say. But it does seem to me there is a way forward in the short term by making the right intercepts - a combination of technology and rules - without building up a redundant and unmanageable nightmare. Or am I wrong? Finally does anyone want my pathetic conversions of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion !! -:) Or is it thanks but no thanks! Jim Tinsley wrote:
On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 05:20:08PM -0800, Jon Niehof wrote:
As always, volunteer in the ways you see fit, but I suspect many here (at least us DPers) would argue that working on new texts hitherto unavailable to PG is probably a better use of your time than providing multiple reformatted versions of existing works.
I would agree; it seems to me that converting into a format that cannot be programmatically converted into other formats (including other "master" formats like DP-TEI, whenever that gets specified), is rather a waste of one's time.
Anything that isn't a value-add (like converting straight text to Word or PDF without adding, say, bookmark information) also strikes me as not too useful. I could blast all of PG into Weasel format without a lot of trouble, for example, but I don't see a benefit as anybody who could make use of it could easily do the conversion as well.
Well put. What we call "blind format conversions" -- conversions from one format to another, based on your own preferences, without any value-added input such as, say, illustrations from an eligible edition -- are not things that we really want to post, without some special reason. We have done it in the past, and it hasn't worked well.
Sites like Blackmask http://blackmask.com do a better job of managing such content than we do, and in fact David Moynihan of Blackmask has offered us all of his converted files if we want them. We discussed it a few years ago, and decided against.
(pie-in-the-sky: being able to on-the-fly convert TEI to format of user's choice on download would be nearly Grail-like.)
You don't need TEI just for conversion. Today, HTML is the Universal Format for converting _from_. It may not be so always, and HTML has limits; it ain't great on mathematical texts, for instance, but given HTML, you can very easily get to any of the common reader formats in one step.
jim
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