121–130 of 135 posts
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Why would you force people to use nonfree proprietary software in order to contribute to an open project?
That's a good point. I find Zulip better than Slack/Discord for discourse (even better than mailing lists, with some caveats, and it's Apache-licensed: https://zulipchat.com/
> Other free ebooks don’t put much effort into professional-quality typography: they use "straight" quotes instead of “curly” quotes, they ignore details like em- and en-dashes, and they look more like early-90’s web pages instead of actual books. True. I hope you guys get proper funding and keep this project on. Contribute: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/ (I was thinking a Slack or Discord would be better tha…
> they use "straight" quotes instead of “curly” quote why care?
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> they use "straight" quotes instead of “curly” quote why care?
I don't mean this ironically, I really don't understand why would anyone care about such things?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mexican%E2%80%93American_...
Here's a lengthy village pump discussion, with no outcome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy...
Look at the word counts for some of the discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre...
Some of these discussions end up on Arbcom which is pretty severe: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitra...
It seems a lot of people do care, passionately, about the difference between "" and “”.
It's great that these are in a consistent formatting style. When trying to extract some contents programmatically from some Gutenberg texts, I kept running into different formatting styles. That combined with being able to check out the entire repository makes it much simpler to do data processing on the works. And, of course, fixing more errors is of course a noble goal. Are these corrections going to make it upstre…
> Are these corrections going to make it upstream to Gutenberg? It's an issue worth raising to the team. In the spirit of GPL, I think reporting any instances of clear typos in the source text upstream would be a good idea. The problem is that so much work is done to the text as part of StandardEbook production that we can't exactly just submit a single patch or diff. It would be difficult to identify the textual cor…
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> Standard Ebooks puts significant work into designing, formatting, marking up, and hosting our ebooks. While some think we could, or even should, release our work with some kind of copyright notice, instead Standard Ebooks dedicates the entirety of each of our ebook files, including markup, cover art, and everything in between, to the public domain. https://standardebooks.org/about/
Public Domain projects that subtly argue for an extensive view of copyright in ambiguous (in the best case) situations make me somewhat suspicious. Editing is a lot work, and their efforts are appreciated. But most of that involves the application of existing rules (curly quotes etc.) and therefore doesn't meet the creativity standard of copyright. I guess the texts are out there anyway, and it doesn't make much of a…
> [T]hose who are hesitant to use photos of works that are in the public domain […] should know that under the law if the image is “slavish,” a mere reproduction, a plain unadorned exact image, they can use it and do not have to pay anyone a licensing fee.
I got really excited, but then I noticed that there was no PDF option. I hate epubs with a passion, because all epub programs suck.
Have you tried FBReader ( https://fbreader.org/ ). The Android version has so far met my needs, and the Linux version works well (in my opinion).
Notice the gray margin outside the sheet, and the padding inside the sheet. The first one gives you a general frame of view, and also you don't want the document to use the whole screen width when using a 16:9 monitor or similar screen.
The padding is necessary because you don't want characters too close to a margin, else they look like they're escaping the sheet.
I haven't been able to replicate this setup with Calibre, FBReader or any other epub reader.
Fonts are another issue. Default fonts always suck. FBReader uses Dejavu Serif, that, in my opinion looks just bad. I changed it to Bitstream Charter, which looks decent, but then the line justification looked wrong, I changed that, and then paragraph margin looked wrong. There's a million little things that look horrible by default and you have to spend an hour per book setting up your reader so that it looks right.
I've tried generating PDFs with Calibre, the result: giant ugly fonts, zero sheet padding, nonsensical spacing, etc.
At some point you just give up and avoid epubs like the plague.
[#] The book is called Crypto 101, by lvh.
I got really excited, but then I noticed that there was no PDF option. I hate epubs with a passion, because all epub programs suck.
What about any of the ways to convert epub to pdf yourself? Are they no good? If anything, I think an HTML version that you can view right on the website would be the best format addition. It's always interesting to me when a website doesn't offer a browser-native document format as an option to view text.
I could spend the time trying to make them look right, but I don't want to spend my time that way. I prefer learning things that will give me more satisfaction per second spent.
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Guessing the implication being that Google is ultimately not "free" w/ respect to your personal data and how it is used.
Yes but how does Google enter into this?
