I retract the words I put into Bowerbirds mouth – I must have misinterpreted his intent in some of the things he emailed – welcome to email.

How about as a practical suggestion to at least make *some* progress forward out of this morass, how about if we agree that HTML be *one* of the sufficient file formats by itself for inclusion into PG, without the need to also submit PG TXT format?  Since Bowerbird claims it is easy to go from PG TXT to HTML, then certainly it is as easy to go from HTML to PG TXT – and Bowerbird, or someone -- can provide a “Make PG Happy” automagical tool that will “properly” encode PG TXT indentation for verse in order to encode “please don’t wrap me” and can make PG-Happy decisions about how exactly to wrap at “72 chars” without making the underlying text too ugly (not a trivial issue in my experience) and can decide what ligatures in what embedded languages should be broken into two chars, and what underlying PG TXT char encoding should be used to make the best tradeoffs between maintaining the glyphs the original author used vs. “how low can you go” backwards compatibility with the various teletype emulator programs in use worldwide. Etc.

Because, frankly, as a volunteer, these issues nauseate me.  It is not my cup of tea.  I would much rather put my time and effort into trying to do ONE reasonably good encoding of a real-world honest to god book published by some real-world publisher preferably during the lifetime of the author so that hopefully Michael will not continuously make the argument that publishers never respect the intent of the author anyway. [In my experience the first and second editions publishers of John Muir “First Summer” DID do to a very good job of representing in printed form the style and flavor of the hand-written camp notebooks Muir made during that summer and on the contrary it is the mechanizations of DP in trying to follow the coding conventions of PG that discards this intent– so I believe it is Michael who is making excuses for *PG* being the publisher who doesn’t respect the original intent of the author by requiring PG coding conventions be respected uber alle!]

And I do not pretend to be “perfect” in my choices of encoding these books – which is *precisely* why I would like to have an acceptable input acceptance format that is not “write once” but could be picked up and improved by another volunteer in the future – perhaps one who say has a photocopy of John Muir’s handwritten camp notes at hand, and can perform a Ph.D. thesis-level encoding of what Muir “really meant to say” perhaps using the full power of say TEI.

>jim said:
>>   As Bowerbird is only too happy to point out:
>>   “Please feel free to go somewhere else!”

>jim, jim, jim.  i'm just about the only person here
>who has any sympathy with what you are saying,