Let's take the McGuffey book as an example to review these points and provide an example for doing them properly. On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 10:02 PM, James Adcock <jimad@msn.com> wrote:
Let’s back up a step, and see if there is some areas we can agree on, namely there are a variety of areas that pretty much every book has which are “simple as dirt” yet the books PG posts are still not handling these “simple everyday items” in a robust and reader-enjoyable manner.****
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**1) **Paragraphs. PG is still serving books, frequently, like all the time, with broken paragraph formatting.
I can think of cases I've seen where paragraphs have not been handled properly; but I have no idea if they are the same as yours. As it stands, your assertion about broken paragraphs wouldn't be helpful for me as a text provider because I probably think I have marked all my paragraphs properly; you may disagree and you may be right; but there's no information I can use to fix what's wrong.
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**2) **TOC. Hard to implement in HTML and to get it to work “right” on the major platforms.
I don't understand why we are manually constructing tables of contents in the first place. All the chapters need to be located; all the chapter headings need to be identified and positioned; and all it takes is some software to create a guaranteed accurate TOC from the text.
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**3) **Blockquotes. Similar issues to paragraphs.
Same comment as paragraphs. A problem I see is that some things are marked as block quotes that aren't block quotes, simply because they are formatted like block quotes.
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4) Illustrations. Hard to get right. Will work on some platforms and not others. Some submitted illustrations don’t work on some platforms.
Agreed, and this one will need discussion.
**5) **Covers. Every book should have them, and they ought to be easy to implement.
Shouldn't they be easy to auto-generate from metadata?
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**6) **Title page. Again, pretty much every book should have them, and they should be easy to implement. The title page info should not have to also be submitted redundantly 12 other places.
I don't understand the "12 other places" comment.
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**7) **PG Boilerplate. Should be implemented in an attractive and non-obtrusive manner, which does not scare off the readers, nor make PG look like idiots, and should be written in such a manner as to convince most readers that the boilerplate is actually a good thing to their advantage.
Agreed. But Greg needs to agree and commit to do something about it.
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**8) **Statement that this book is “risen to the public domain” and what that means. The implication that PG is giving away this book is false, because the book is not PG’s to give away. Rather, the book belongs to the public in the first place.
Probably true but I'm not sure who would disagree, or what the significance is.
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**9) **A clean, fun, positive-feedback way to submit books to PG, such that people WANT to submit books to PG, rather than do so grudgingly.
Yes.
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**10) **A clean, fun, easy, robust way to preview and “smooth read” one’s work and formatting and “conformance to standards” testing before submitting it to PG.****
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Yes.
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So what I claim we need is a simple method, using universally available and well-supported tools, to do these kinds of “dirt simple all the time” things, and do them in a way that actually works on BOTH the submitters side, and PG’s side of things. Such support need not be implemented in terms of this, that or the other language. Nor does it matter much whether it is implemented client side or server side or a mix thereof.****
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Agreed. That's why I want to challenge any proposers to provide at least a prototype of what is being proposed, in the form of examples collected in one place so they can be remembered and compared. A list server like this is a very poor medium for refining and comparing anything. It would also help to avoid reactions that categorize proposals as categorically bad and make general statements about the proposer's character or intelligence. Or fail to provide a better alternative, with real examples we can compare with each other. Yes, bowerbird, I know you're providing the last item. Not so much on the others.
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