Sankar Viswanathan wrote:
Most of the post processors in D.P depend on Guiguts for post processing. More than 80% of the texts have been produced by using Guiguts. But for the availability of the Guiguts program many of the post processors would have never ventured to post process.
That's the more water to my mill. You need a custom program to proof the txt file while any old editor can proof html.
The Guiguts program has been written for the specific purpose of post processing of DP books. It is well supported with additional programs like Gutcheck and Jeebies.
Bad enough that a special program had to be written while many free editors excel at doing html.
Guiguts generates the html from the text automatically. Guiguts has been written taking into account the DP process.
Yeah, for suitably small values of `HTML´. I installed guiguts and downloaded Hamlet #1524. Then I pushed the 'Autogenerate HTML' button in guiguts. This is part of what I got: <p>Ham. To be, or not to be,—that is the question:— Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?—To die,—to sleep,— No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to,—'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die,—to sleep;— To sleep! perchance to dream:—ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death,— The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn No traveller returns,—puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; And enterprises of great pith and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.—Soft you now! The fair Ophelia!—Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember'd.</p> guiguts takes its place in the long file of products and services who tried to make something of PG plain text and failed. Mind you, I'm not saying that guiguts is a bad program, I'm saying that it is impossible to recover the formatting once a text has been dumbed down to PG plain text.
Again the question is what do the users want?
Users want as many formats as possible to choose from.
So even if we have put in additional effort to produce a text version it is justified.
Not so. We can do that automatically with lynx --dump. lynx is free, so anybody can do that. If you produce a `smart´ version you can dumb it down with software. If you produce a `dumb´ version, it is impossible to smart it up again with software.
Do we have any feedback from the actual users? Letters from users who submit detailed Errata shows that the text files are being used for teaching school children in the remote areas of U.S. These are the people who make the effort worthwhile. May be it also benefits people who are still on Dial Up.
Why do *those* people make the effort worthwile? Are you a bit prejudiced against better-off people? "War and Peace" is 1.18M in HTML and 1.16M in TXT. How can that benefit people on dial-up?
Plain text can be read in any computer. HTML? With all the quirks of IE6 and other browsers it is not easy to produce html which will render perfectly in all the browsers.
It is very easy indeed. Stick to the basic tags and even plucker on a cell phone will render perfectly. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org