On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 5:10 AM, Marcello Perathoner <marcello@perathoner.de> wrote:
Of course you have to learn TEI, as you had to learn HTML. No difference there.
But we know HTML, for one. We also have tools that help us with HTML, for two. For three and the strike-out, I have a host of tools that will help me edit, verify and view HTML, but there is no Debian packages for PGTEI. Yes, yes, if I want to spend my hours mucking around with stuff, I can in theory get it all installed.
PG has an implementation of TEI. I know you don't like it because you haven't figured out how to produce pretty title pages.
Note: by "pretty title pages" Marcello means a title page that looks like any title page in an actual book. Once again, I grabbed the nearest books; I have ten books, by ten different publishers, including two in Esperanto and one in a mixture of Esperanto and Chinese, and with the exception of one of the English books which right-justifies its title page, they all follow the basic format of centered pages, title (new line) author (bottom of page) publisher. None of them look a darn thing like the title pages PGTEI prints out.
and has a full suite of tools:
I see "To install the filter(s), start Open Office and and follow the Tools / XML Filter Settings menu. Choose Open Package and locate the .jar file(s)." Again, no difference at all from stuff that comes preinstalled.
3. Worthless to the end user ...
TEI is a master format. Its use is in producing formats suitable for end-user consumption.
Then prove it. If I saw a single document produced from PGTEI that was suitable for end-user consumption, I might support it. Look damnit, I was a fan of TEI until I realized that the people who were going to bring it to PG didn't give a damn about making the output something we wanted people to see.
Anf if we don't equate end user == reader but try: end user == librarian or end user == lunguistic researcher we find that TEI is many times as useful as HTML.
The librarian is never the end-user. The librarian is the person who makes it available to the end-user. Nobody around here cares about the linguistic researcher as the end user, and we will never produce files that are marked up with the type of information--like distinguishing sentence ending punctuation from the same punctuation used other ways--that they need. The end user we're targeting is the reader.
4. No decent output ...
`Decentness´ is a matter of debate.
Which is why you blow at selling this. Until you accept that PGTEI needs to produce output that meets the standards of the people you're trying to sell it to, nobody cares.
At DP some PPers think it is essential to use every CSS feature at least once in every text, having pictures float right and left and text flowing around them and having illuminated dropcaps and printers ornaments and page numbers all over the place. PGTEI cannot (yet) do that.
I very much prefer a simple layout, with only essential pictures smack in the middle of the text flow at the point they logically belong. A formatting that is easily ported to all existing devices. PGTEI excels at this.
Yes, in fact, some PPers do want to produce an etext that replicates the original, includes the important illustrated dropcaps (that are frequently as much a part of the illustration of the book as any other illustration) and page numbers (that are crucial for much of the non-fiction that we reproduce, especially if you want to follow the web of references from one PG era book to another.)
Ironically `decent´ DP output is already falling to pieces on ePub devices (not even to mention Mobipocket) because ePub does not support CSS position: absolute.
And if you had produced TEI output that could do what people wanted to do, it's possible that we would have better output on the ePub devices. Right now, I would be surprised to find that PGTEI can output at all to ePub, and I wouldn't be surprised if the people who produced the DP output were happier with the results of their HTML translated to ePub than your HTML translated to ePub. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.