[wikireader] Project Gutenberg (again)

Tom Bachmann e_mc_h2 at web.de
Mon Jun 7 19:43:44 CEST 2010


Dear all,

after taking a rather longish break, I'm back working on my project 
gutenberg integration code. This message consists of three parts: in the 
first part, I quickly describe what it is all about. The second part 
contains a number of technical questions, and the third part talks about 
bugs in wiki-app.

All code is available at gitorious: 
git://gitorious.org/wikireader-ness/wikireader-ness2.git


What this is all about:

My idea is that akin to wikipedia, project gutenberg provides a large 
collection of free data that may be nice carrying in your pocket. So I 
have been working on extending the offline-render to also process ebooks 
in EPUB format.
To quickly see what this is about, try

make DESTDIR=image WORKDIR=work WIKI_FILE_PREFIX=wiki  WIKI_LANGUAGE=en 
WIKI_DIR_SUFFIX=guten  EBOOK_FILES=ebook-samples VERBOSE=yes cleandirs 
createdirs birc

There is some more functionality on which I can elaborate if anyone is 
interested, but this is basically it.
You have to harvest the ebooks yourself, but I can provide scripts for 
project gutenberg, and also for project gutenberg-de.


Technical Questions:

1) Is there a "deep" reason why boldface fonts are not implemented? I 
figure they are not really relevant for wikis, but would be nice for 
some of the books. Unless there is something that complicates the matter 
I'm not seeing, I think I will add them (should be straightforward to 
mimic the behaviour of italic fonts?).

2) Could you please add the characters U+2039 and U+203A ('SINGLE 
LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK' and right-pointing version) to the 
font? They are used quite often in some books and the box just looks 
ugly. Again I would do this myself but there seem to be a number of 
intermediate stages in font generation that I don't really understand.

3) Is it possible that the english language image on 
dev.thewikireader.org is corrupted? When I try to extract it with 7z x 
enpedia.7z I get a cryptic "Error: E_FAIL" message. (I'm running 
standard 7z of debian testing, version 9.04 beta.)


Bugs in wiki-app:

I believe that in the course of writing and testing my extensions, I 
have fixed some minor bugs in the core wiki-app code. My changes are 
very small and isolated, so the maintainers of the main repository may 
wish to look at these files only.


Thanks,
Tom



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