On 10/11/2011 06:16 AM, Jim Adcock wrote:
Whether or not making the html file "look good" is wasted energy
It is not only wasted energy but actual damage. DP is run like a tea party and produces pretty embroidery, but that embroidery only fits the producer's tea table. There's very little knowledge at DP about computer technology or book design nor any desire to acquire it. (There are a few knowledgeable individuals, but they are drowned out by the crowd.) At the same time DP is obsessed about rank and procedure: They have `General Managers´ and `DP Boards´ and `Codes of Conduct´ and a bigger part of the software is concerned with ranking proofers than with assisting those proofers with their jobs. DP has imploded and there's no indication that they will or want to reform themselves. Time to start over. I'm interested in and willing to offer all technical support I'm capable of to a new DP built around these guidelines: 1. Use one master format for every book. (There will be a small set of master formats to choose from.) 2. Minimize formatting. Make books that are usable across a wide variety of devices, not books that look exactly like the paper edition. 3. Use a resource control system (like git) for posting and maintenance. PG will host the master repository and the public can pull from it. A group of `committers´ can push. Every committer can have his own group of aides and pull from them. 4. Use already scanned material: IA, Google, Gallica etc. 5. Important works first. Don't bother with those embarrassing amateurish works DP turns out by the hundreds. 6. Accept unicode only. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org