Re: In search of a more-vanilla vanilla TXT
greg said:
Or what is the most primitive device in use today
the web-browser. a web-browser won't wrap the lines on a .txt file, so if the hard-returns were removed from p.g. .txt files, the lines would run off the screen of a web-browser. try it if you don't believe me. *** it's absolutely true that project gutenberg should have given users a tool that would remove the hard returns, and it should've done that years ago, but it's also true that the .txt files _should_ have hard-returns in them. now, i'd suggest that those hard-returns should mimic the ones found in the print-books against which the text was proofed, but that won't help the books already done. -bowerbird
On Fri, 11 Sep 2009, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
greg said:
Or what is the most primitive device in use today
the web-browser.
a web-browser won't wrap the lines on a .txt file, so if the hard-returns were removed from p.g. .txt files, the lines would run off the screen of a web-browser.
try it if you don't believe me.
***
it's absolutely true that project gutenberg should have given users a tool that would remove the hard returns, and it should've done that years ago, but it's also true that the .txt files _should_ have hard-returns in them.
now, i'd suggest that those hard-returns should mimic the ones found in the print-books against which the text was proofed, but that won't help the books already done.
-bowerbird
We did do that years ago, and years before that. We also had very similar discussions years ago. I can't tell you how many times we posted info about different ways to remove hard returns, what they were, etc., etc., etc. As along as there are people who want it all done for them without any knowledge fo how a computer works, this will be an issue, along with background color, font, font size, long or short pages or margins, refresh rates.... mh
Michael S. Hart wrote:
I can't tell you how many times we posted info about different ways to remove hard returns, what they were, etc., etc., etc.
Strawman. The problem is to decide which LF to retain. In Hamlet there are speeches that are verse and speeches that are prose. The LFs in verse need to be retained! There has never been posted any info on how to achieve this. OTOH there is much empirical evidence that the problem of restoring PG plain texts is intractable: Very many people have tried to write tools that convert the plain text mess into something usable. GutenMark, Munseys, Manybooks etc. come to mind. But when you download some of their machine-made repackages of PG you see that they didn't get very far. PG has a very high standard of accuracy for the words, thus an automatic conversion has to achieve the same high standard for the formatting. Unless somebody can provide this tool, much information has been lost. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
PG has a very high standard of accuracy for the words, thus an automatic conversion has to achieve the same high standard for the formatting.
I would be happy to start with if the same standard for the accuracy of punctuation was held as for the high standards expected of the words. Of course for poetry puncs and LF are basically the same issue.
participants (4)
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Bowerbird＠aol.com -
James Adcock -
Marcello Perathoner -
Michael S. Hart