Re: [NTLK] html2newt news; font metrics? book.hints?

From: Victor Rehorst (victor_at_newtontalk.net)
Date: Wed Nov 20 2002 - 20:16:51 EST


Vladimir Alexiev wrote:
> Our html2newt project is getting some traction: it seems that we 3
> will be joining forces: Vincent Lee (author of Unicode Press), Dakkar
> and me (Vlad). The goal of the project is to make a convertor from
> html/text/[pdf] to newton book, running on win&mac, supporting unicode.

Awesome guys! It's about time someone did this :) I'm gonna throw in my
ideas and such, feel free to take what you want (if you do, feel free to
mention me in the README :)

> Decisions/news/knowledge [dev who did it or wants it]:
> - we need a good name for this project, please help!!!
> -- I like Vince's "UniPress", but it may lead to confusion because
> unlike Newton Press, this will be fully automatic and won't be interactive
> (does anyone really use Newton Press?)
> -- html2newt is an imprecise name because we'll want to support more
> input formats (it's lame anyway).

How about just "ToNewt" or "2NC" for To Newton Converter?

> - we'll support Mac [Vince, Dakkar] and Win [Vlad] from the start
> (perhaps also Linux).

If you need it, I can help out with changing things to compile under Linux,
BSD or Cygwin.

> PDF support (this is important to Didier and Laurent):
> - Vince currently does text (uncompressed only) from pdf but the
> extraction is rudimentary.

There are a few pretty good Perl modules for accessing PDF documents
programmatically, try searching CPAN. Maybe you could exploit these.

> - what is book.hints?
> -- I think that we understand most of the rest about a book's structure, or
> can figure it out relatively easily with some Bookmaker experiments.

Reading NewtonScript frames is always a good way to learn things.

-- 
Victor Rehorst - victor_at_newtontalk.net - chuma_at_chuma.org
NewtonTalk list administrator - http://www.newtontalk.net
Will help you with your list problems - as long as you're nice.

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