Bowerbird, I agree on what you say about guiguts. When writing the book I often found myself recommending things that I considered to be not that great but better than nothing. It is truly awful to install and has many bugs, etc. I may update my book to change my recommendation at some point. That said, the HTML generation in guiguts actually has been of some use to me. I think I said all I have to say about how I'd want it to be improved, so I don't think I'll get sidetracked. For this book I won't use guiguts to re-wrap my pages or generate HTML. I'll use your tools or put together a Python script to do the things we've been talking about if I think I can improve on what you've done. The audience for my book is different. They will be reading books on an actual PC, so using archive.org PDFs and DjVu's is a reasonable alternative for them, and in fact may be the best one for children's books. Also, their Read Activity uses WebKit to render EPUBs so anything that works well in HTML will also look great as an EPUB. When you read my book in the Read Activity it looks amazingly good: https://plus.google.com/photos/114689250113657220289/albums/5627505254183409... I do mention in passing that publishing books on the Kindle Store is something they can aspire to do but I don't really push the idea all that much. The idea of the book is "you have these cheap low-powered computers for your children and you want to use them for education. Here's some cool stuff you can do cheaply or even for free and some hints to get you started." Maybe someday we can do a really definitive FLOSS Manual on making e-books. James Simmons On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 2:27 PM, <Bowerbird@aol.com> wrote:

james-

i wanna make sure that you and i don't get sidetracked by this discussion that's going on about guiguts and .epub...

i think it's important to stay focused because -- for one -- you recommended guiguts in your "enlightenment" book, and -- for another -- you've said here that _you_ use it...

let me say, right at the outset, that i do respect guiguts... thundergnat -- the original programmer -- did a service for distributed proofreaders that very few will ever match. people who've worked on it since steve, including hunter, have helped as well; guiguts has been invaluable to many.

and i mean all of that praise quite sincerely, i really do...

at the same time, however, guiguts is long in the tooth... and it never was too user-friendly; it's a _bear_ to install.

but the worst thing about it is that it was molded out of the d.p. workflow, which is _not_ something to emulate.

so unless you're working inside d.p. -- and maybe even not then -- you definitely do _not_ want to use guiguts.

still... as far as the current _discussion_ goes, join in!

hunter is _asking_ for advice, so give him some, and he might just be able to improve the resultant output. i'm not too hopeful about that, for reasons i'll append, but i'm not opposed to change, and it could happen...

but even if guiguts does "improve", in terms of input for the .epub converter, you still won't want to use it.

all of the useful things it does -- and it does many -- are things that you can write your own scripts to do.

and scripts you write will work much better, for you.

this _specifically_ includes the text-to-html routine...

you might or might not decide to adopt my .zml, but even if you don't, i can _guarantee_ that you will have seen enough of the light to realize you can d.i.y. this.

so join the fun of the current discussion, and see if you can learn anything from it, but understand that -- in the long run -- guiguts will not matter to you.

-bowerbird

p.s. so why i am not optimistic about this discussion?

1. we discussed it a million times; it never mattered. 2. marcello doesn't care a whit what anybody thinks. 3. the d.p. postprocessors don't care what you think. 4. postprocessors got recruited as snowflake makers. 5. everyone wants the e-books made to _their_ taste. 6. too many cooks spoil the soup; so then it's spoiled. 7. 3 d.p. committees worked on this; they all gave up. 8. .epub is a moving target; tomorrow, apple moves it. 9. it's impossible for a single .epub to please everybody. 10. end-users will soon demand an ability to customize.

so... have fun. but i've got better things to do... :+)

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