From: Bruce E. Durocher II (bedii_at_qwest.net)
Date: Tue Apr 06 2004 - 08:39:47 PDT
As anyone who has checked the Infomotions site can tell you, the
conversion software is not running--it's temporarily only handling PDF.
Below you'll see my e-mails with the gent who owns the site. As you
can see, he's perfectly willing to include automatic etext conversion
for the Newton again: he just needs an OS X native tool to handle it.
He suggests a rewritten Paperback which I seem to remember had been
discussed on the list previously--that David Fedor wasn't hostile but
didn't want to write a new version. (My apologies for the eccentric
formatting, but when I tried to paste his replies directly into a
message for the list it was bounced from the mailing list because there
were too many quoted lines in it.) Any ideas to pass along to this
gent?
>>> The question came up on the Newtontalk mailing list when some of
the users urged some of the programmers that use the list to come up
>>> with a solution that can run natively under OS X. Unfortunately,
as I'm sure you know, Apple never published the full standard on the
>>> format and folks have been impatient with either having to run
tools to do the job in Classic, fire up a Windows machine, copy HTML
>>> versions into a Newton and make the conversion there with
NewtsCape, or do PDF to text versions. Would you mind if I quoted your
reply
>>> on the mailing list so those folks who were trying to remember
infomations.com know that you are no longer in the
conversions-on-the-fly
>>> business? (If you manage to add the capability again, of course,
I'd be happy to mention that as well!) Once again, thanks!
>> Yes, support of Newton-type book is fading. Quite a number of months
ago I had hardware failure. This prohibited my ability to create
>> Newton Paperbacks anymore. Alas. I am *slowly* in the process of
redoing my Alex Catalog, and I hope to be able to provide many more
>> ebook formats again, but this will be a long time coming. Six to
nine months. So, I'm not sure what to recommend.
> No problem. I expected you to quote my reply in any event. :-)
> As an additional note, I plan to mark up my documents in a flavor of
XML called TEI. I then plan to transform these XML documents into other
> formats. Right now, in my experimental sandbox, I can automatically
create plain text, robust XHTML, PDF, Rocket eBook files, and PalmPilot
> DOC files. With a bit more work I will be able to create Palm Reader
documents. If I were given a specification for easily readable Newton
> files, then I *might* be able to create those as well. I thought
those Newton Paperbacks were pretty good. Do you think you could
convinced
> the developer of that application to re-write his program for Mac OS
X? See:
> http://www.thefedors.com/pobox/
> --
> Eric Lease Morgan
> http://www.infomotions.com
On Apr 5, 2004, at 6:34 AM, DJ Vollkasko wrote:
> Or maybe it's
>
> Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts
>
> (http://www.infomotions.com/alex/): "Another unique feature of the
> Catalogue is the on-the-fly creation of PDF (Portable Document Format)
> files. Using this option you can specify things like fonts and font
> sizes
> for your output." (from http://www.infomotions.com/alex/about.shtml)
>
>
> There may be others that offer multi-format ebooks on the fly/readily
> available for free. Hopefully other will chime in.
>
> Cheers,
>
> DJV.
Bruce E. Durocher II
bedii_at_qwest.net
-- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
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