RE: OT Palm readers Re: [dvd-discuss] CTEA Protects What Copyrights?

["Richard Hartman" <hartman(at)onetouch.com>]

Actually some simple markup would be a really
nice idea for Gutenberg ... call it GML.

There's the OEB (Open EBook) standard (which
is used by Mobi) but that's pretty durned
complex.  There's also PML (Palm Markup
Language) that PalmReader makes use of.
It's pretty simple, but it's a non-SGML-based
markup and it might be harder to accept
as a standard these days.  Of course, there's
always NROFF ;-)

There's something to be said for absolute
bare-bones plain text ... you will _always_
be able to read it ... but it will never
be convenient.  A primitive markup standard
for Gutenberg texts would be a welcome
enhancement I think.

In the meantime I've tried to make do w/
a perl script (that has to be altered
slightly with each book since there isn't
even a standard for denoting chapters...)


-- 
-Richard M. Hartman
hartman@onetouch.com

186,000 mi/sec: not just a good idea, it's the LAW!



> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Zulauf [mailto:johnzu@ia.nsc.com]
> Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 2:43 PM
> To: dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu
> Subject: OT Palm readers Re: [dvd-discuss] CTEA Protects What
> Copyrights?
> 
> 
> Weasel Reader is the new name of GutenPalm.  Don't get me 
> wrong, I like
> the reader.
> 
> The conversion line of:
> 
> makeztxt -a 1 -r "Stave [0-9]*" -l "carol10.txt"
> 
> is nearly as as cryptic as the beloved "find" command and 
> then having to
> use the "Install" interface to download the texts -- it could be a lot
> more user friendly, no?  Certainly the less technophilic members of my
> family aren't quite going to grok the regexp based TOC generator. 
> (Stave being the chapter heading for Dicken's "A Christmas Carol")
> 
> What I'd like to see is metainformation embedded into the Project
> Gutenberg (P.G.) text files that would give line wrap mode / TOC gen
> hints to automate the process.   These *could* be in regexp (or ???)
> notation buried in the standard P.G. "small print" and still meet the
> "plain text readable" goals of P.G.  Any reason why 
> metainformation tags
> shouldn't be suggested to them?  
> 
> Actually, one thought I had was just adding a perl header or footer to
> the file with the plain text just being a "here file."  Thus 
> the text is
> both a plain text file and it's one content converter.  Simple
> metatagging is probably safer/saner.  Imagine ebooks as virii.
> 
> .002
> 
> 
> Jeme A Brelin wrote:
> > 
> > On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, John Zulauf wrote:
> > > (who has just devoured two of the free Honor Harrington 
> novels reading
> > > them on his Palm, and has discovered the less than user friendly
> > > combination of "makeztxt" and "Weasel" to get Proj Gut. 
> books also onto
> > > the Palm)
> > 
> > That's odd, I've had no trouble at all using GutenPalm.  
> I'd recommend it.
> > 
> > J.
> > --
> >    -----------------
> >      Jeme A Brelin
> >     jeme@brelin.net
> >    -----------------
> >  [cc] counter-copyright
> >  http://www.openlaw.org
> 
>