the d.p. foundation board had a meeting recently. the general manager:

was unanimously re-affirmed for a period of two years, ending 12/31/2013;

it's good to know that everything's going great at d.p. stay the course! she was also charged with this:

The GM will collaborate with volunteers to produce a draft of Best Practices for HTML versions of our e-texts which will, by their nature, facilitate better conversion to ePub format.

so i guess you guys here don't need to bother with that, since it's being covered over there... *** unless, of course, you guys are having fun with all your complex discussions of unnecessarily complicated stuff. i hope so. masochists and sadists always seem to find each other... but for everyone else... *** the time is right now. we have come to a fork in the road. you can take that tortured path of those sadomasochists. or you can come with me on the sweet path of simplicity. *** here is an extremely brief recap of what i've done: 1. i studied books to survey features they contained. 2. i created zen markup language to tag the features. 3. i edited a test-suite which contains those features. 4. i wrote code to convert the test-suite into e-books. so, the "master" file is z.m.l. -- a light-markup format which is so simple a 4th-grader can understand it -- and all of the other formats (including plain old .html) are generated from that .zml master, via a button-click. there's even an authoring-tool, so you can verify that your book is being handled correctly _as_you_write_it_. this is the simple fork, folks. this is the way it should be. *** so, i generated the .mobi and .epub from the test-suite. the e-book output is basically correct, as far as i know, but the formatting needs some rough edges smoothed. (actually, i didn't even look at it, but i assume that's so.) if anyone has criticism in that regard, i'd love to hear it. (don't even have to be "constructive" criticism, although any attempts to put me on a merry-go-round will _fail_.) i am shifting my focus -- from old books to new ones, born digital, from the self-publishers of the future -- but cloning these public-domain books is easy enough, so my system should work just fine for your purposes... *** here's the test-suite:

http://zenmagiclove.com/test-suite-2012.txt

here's the script that converts the test-suite into .html:

http://zenmagiclove.com/cgi-bin/t2.py

here's the .mobi version of the test-suite:

http://zenmagiclove.com/suite/suite.mobi

here's the .epub version of the test-suite:

http://zenmagiclove.com/suite/suite-epub.epub

here's the folder holding all of the conversion files:

http://zenmagiclove.com/suite/

here's a .zip file containing all of the conversion files:

http://zenmagiclove.com/suite/suite-all.zip

*** you're now at a fork in the road. which way do you go? -bowerbird