On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 10:04:01PM -0500, Ron Aitchison wrote:
Whoa there. Clearly I walked into a minefield and feel in imminent danger of having various limbs blasted from my poor undeserving corpus.
Minefield, yes. We really should put a sign up at the gates. :-) But nobody wants to blast you, I promise. It's an old, old, subject, and we've tried various things at verious times over the last 5 years or so -- some tries even pre-date that. I don't think there's one we don't regret. So it's not like we're dismissing your idea out of hand; it's one of those things that we've all thought of, and we'd all like to do, and we never quite forget it, and it pops up now and again even among old hands, but it's a net negative. And there's a lot of people here who have a lot of experience of the subject. There was probably a time when even I thought that posting individual blind format conversions was a good idea, but it must have been long ago.
Let me state my point of view or why I made the offer and why I think perhaps trees and forests may be getting a little confused. Now I'm new to this stuff and many of you good folks have labored for years so if I lay a few mines of my own - so be it. 1. The primary reason for my offer was simply that since I found the simple text version unpleasant to read I thought there may be others and that having a choice of formats available may make the output - the books - more approachable hence reach a wider audience and all the good things that must flow from that. Seems to me this is that GP is about - outreach. 2. I fully understand the issue of editable text. and rampant variations - a maintenance nightmare. Untenable. So let me address the issue of maintenance and incidentally why I do not think that my offer need cause the end of the world as we know it. There are two parts to this argument: 1. The basic format that I have converted to is OpenOffice 's XML format from which multiple conversions - PDF and MS doc if you want - are derived. . All essentially driven from a set of DTD's. My brief reading of TEI is that it too uses an XML base. So we have a trivial level of commonality as a starting point. By looking at the conversion processes we could have a WSYIWYG editor off-the-shelf at $0 cost with output convertible to TEI output by driving it through appropriate XLST's and all that good stuff. OpenOffice has a pilot development with DocBook to do something similar. It is not making much progress but with the right effort it could. 2. The second point relates to the difficulty, of success possibility, of conversion. I used 4 styles in the book. Header 1, paragraph, page header and page footer (the last two could be easily removed but are tactically useful because of page numbering). For a simple text book I see no reason to use any more and the cost of replacement of header /footer with an alternate implementation is trivial in the extreme. Hard pagination is perhaps a bit more difficult to handle and I'm not sure I should have done it but in the absence of any instructions/suggestions to the contrary I did. So a set of simple rules in the period before an idealized solution is available would significantly reduce difficulties. Now whether TEI is better than DocBook or a converged OASIS standard is not for me to say. But it does seem to me there is a way forward in the short term by making the right intercepts - a combination of technology and rules - without building up a redundant and unmanageable nightmare. Or am I wrong? Finally does anyone want my pathetic conversions of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion !! -:) Or is it thanks but no thanks!
Your conversions may well be lovely; their quality isn't at all an issue here. It's just not something that we do, except under some compelling special circumstances. jim