From: Eric Lease Morgan (eric_morgan_at_infomotions.com)
Date: Wed Apr 21 2004 - 15:08:48 PDT
On Apr 19, 2004, at 1:44 PM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> From a user's point of view, which has a better interface for reading
> texts on a Newton? Newton Book or Newton Paperback?...
Thank you for your replies. They have bared out my initial assumptions.
Newton Books are prettier and complete with more functionality, for the
most part. On the other hand, there is nothing functionally wrong with
Newton Paperbacks and users have the option of changing the fonts.
(BTW, yes, Newton Paperback 2.0 does provide a clickable table of
contents feature.)
As the implementer of my Catalogue, I must also ask myself, "Self,
which format is easier for me to create?" So far, the answer I have
come up with is Newton Paperback. To date, assuming a Newton Paperback
approach, I have been able to:
1. Mark-up my original document in TEI/XML.
2. Write an XSLT file to transform my XML into plain text,
complete with table of contents markers for Newton Paperback.
3. Drag-and-drop my transformed document(s) onto Newton Paperback.
4. Get a nice package file out the other end.
No fuss. No muss. No AppleScript. No dialog boxes. Really easy,
especially since 0% of the texts contain images.
My forays into the creation of Newton Book books has not been as
successful. Using Newton Press I have been able to create books rather
easily, and I could automate the process with AppleScript. I might be
able to add typography, albeit rudimentary typography, if I were to
transform my XML into RTF, and feed that to Newton Press. Not too hard,
but I have yet to discover how to combine multiple sized versions into
one book. I am looking forward to learning more about how to create
Newton Books.
I have not had much success with the use of BookMaker 1.1 either. While
BookMaker makes a .f file well enough, the content seems empty. There
is no resource fork. There is no link to the text itself. Instead,
there so nothing but Newtonscript. When I build by book with the
Toolkit and upload the resulting package, I get a weird error. My
package seems empty.
So, Plan A is to go ahead and automate the process of creating Newton
Paperbacks until I learn more about the creation of Newton Books. This
is especially a good option since the documents contain no images and
require only the most rudimentary of typography.
-- Eric Lease Morgan http://www.infomotions.com -- 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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