[NTLK] Newton book part specification

I've been tossing around the concept of writing an OS-X replacement
for Newton Press / BookMaker. Bookmaker is too obscure for casual
use, and Press has always been buggy and crash-prone in my
experience. Not to mention their demand for classic / OS 9 support
will only become more and more of a difficulty as time passes and the
intelMac transition continues.

I've been reviewing the "Newton Formats 1.1" pdf, so I think I can
sort out generation of packages, and the cocoa API will make
generating the user interface pretty simple too. What I lack is a
specification for what the Book part looks like on disk. In doing a
search through the list archives I saw it mentioned that a newton
book specification was never really made available, and that one's
best bet would be to use Frame View to reverse engineer such from
example books and bookmaker output.

Is this still the case? Does anyone know if such a beast has been
found or put together since the subject was last brought up? Should I
get to work on said reverse engineering?

Finally, while I personally would find such a program as a
rejuvenated Newton Press useful, do you think this would be a
worthwhile tool?

Thanks,
        J. Tyler Nichols

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