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