now in other news, rfrank's "fadedpage" proofing site has taken a big step forward, transitioning to a "match-the-page" mode. what's funny is that he thinks he's in "uncharted territory" now. um, no, roger, i've already mapped that land quite extensively. but hey man, if you wanna learn it all by yourself, be my guest. roger is also doing a good job of listening to his users, who keep asking him to provide the types of functionality that i demonstrated with my proofing site. if he only just keeps responding to their requests, sooner or later his site will be working very similar to mine. convergence can be beautiful. one down-side is that roger went to a database operation... that's sad, because when you box your text into a database, it's not nearly as open and convenient as when it's on the web. which means that other people cannot build utility around it... what makes this doubly sad is that it seems that he went to the database to solve the problems he was having with sync, like replacing the text of one page with that of another page. the thing is, synch problems are typical of new e-book code, particularly when it is being written by a new e-book coder, and it really has _nothing_ to do with the underlying storage, whether that be in a database or in your ordinary file-system. so he didn't really _need_ to switch to a database operation... oh well; as long as it's only one step back for two steps forward, he'll keep making progress. oh, and by the way, even at the very start of "match-the-page", the proofers seem to like it a lot. and that will grow over time. -bowerbird