Comments on: Better-looking Project Gutenberg books: An easy guide to the Plucker viewer for Palm users

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 14:05:22 +0000

The more the merrier, Georg. Thanks! – David

By: Georg

Georg — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 11:33:09 +0000

@ZIP Programs: http://www.info-zip.org/ ist free and IMHO more convienientto use than 7zip (for use on command line).

http://www.filzip.com/en/index.html moreover integrates nicely into explorer and knows a lot of formats.

HTH, Georg

By: Passerby

Passerby — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 21:53:03 +0000

I was pleased to discover that my windows desktop version of the uBook reader (www.gowerpoint.com) is able to display plain text PG books in a very readable manner: options can be set so that it reformats line-breaks and parses special ascii markup into an html-like display (underscore shows italic, asteriks shows bold). And it builds a table of content from specified ascii elements. Pretty cool.
There is a “lite” PDA version but I don’t know if it has the same parsing features. The desktop version is 540Kb.

Btw, thanks for your blog, I found it looking for infos about blackmask.com

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 18:06:15 +0000

I will-thanks, Bill. – David

[Update: I did, and it looked great. So did your Alice in Wonderland.]

By: Bill Janssen

Bill Janssen — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 15:22:49 +0000

What would be the advantage of Memoware for PD books if indeed all the PG books are available in Plucker?

Many of the Plucker ebooks at Memoware are futher embellished with cover art, illustrations, better (linked) tables of contents, etc. Try, for instance, my version of Boswell’s LIFE OF JOHNSON, available at Memoware.

By: Branko Collin

Branko Collin — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 10:40:00 +0000

Two tips from an upcoming entry about converting Project Gutenberg Plain Vanilla Text e-books to HTML (based on what Manybooks.net uses): - gut is a program that marks-up Project Gutenberg Etexts to HTML, suitable for reading in any Ebook reader (or any web browser) that supports HTML; e.g. Plucker. - txt2html is a Perl program that converts plain text to HTML. I know of at least three other such tools. One of them even sports a GUI.

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 08:45:47 +0000

Technically you’re right, Branko, but on-the-fly is so fast that in my opinion, it’s okay to say, “Available in Plucker.” Hats off to Plucker and PG for working this one out. – David

By: Branko Collin

Branko Collin — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 08:41:13 +0000

“So, yes, perhaps all PG titles are available that way now, which, if true, would be definite progress for those of us enjoying the amenities.”

IIRC, they’re generated on the fly. At least, that’s what the Plucker page for books at PG suggests: “This ebook needs to be converted to the plucker format.”

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 05:05:41 +0000

“I should point out that Plucker also works on desktops and laptops, not just PalmOS devices. It requires a C compiler and GTK+ 2.2 or better (standard on Linux boxes, and available for Windows and Mac OS X boxes).”

Great points, Bill. The item was for newbies, however; and I wondered if they would really want all those details and want to mess with the additional steps. But it won’t hurt to mention the info, so thanks–and also for those other useful tips.

Meanwhile I’ve been checking out a bunch of Gutenberg titles, and I see they are all available in Plucker. So, yes, perhaps all PG titles are available that way now, which, if true, would be definite progress for those of us enjoying the amenities. What would be the advantage of Memoware for PD books if indeed all the PG books are available in Plucker?

I’m curious what you think about Plucker as an RSS reader or equivalent. So far in the links department, I’ve had to choose between keeping the downloads managable and being able to folllow the links. Perhaps I’m overlooking something. Maybe you can pass on some RSS-related tips.

Where Plucker is definitely helpful: When I see a long page and want to capture it to the Palm. The paste-in-URL feature works great!

David

By: Bill Janssen

Bill Janssen — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 03:42:50 +0000

By the way, also included in the Plucker source release is a program called “explode”. When you run it on a Plucker ebook, it “explodes” the book into a set of HTML pages and images. Probably the fastest way to get an HTML version of a PG ebook is to download the Plucker version, and run “explode” on it.

By: Bill Janssen

Bill Janssen — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 03:38:55 +0000

Memoware also has a nice collection of books in Plucker format.

By: Bill Janssen

Bill Janssen — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 01:54:45 +0000

I should point out that Plucker also works on desktops and laptops, not just PalmOS devices. It requires a C compiler and GTK+ 2.2 or better (standard on Linux boxes, and available for Windows and Mac OS X boxes). Download the 1.8 Plucker source file (from the Plucker Web site at http://www.plkr.org), and build the viewer in the viewer-GTK+2-POSIX subdirectory. The source file also includes the Plucker “distiller”, which will convert HTML pages or whole Web sites into Plucker ebooks. It’s written in Python, so you’ll need to have Python installed to run it.

By the way, I think that all of the Project Gutenberg books are available in Plucker format. Find out the PG # for the book you want (let’s say it’s NUMBER), then download the Plucker version of that book from http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/plucker/NUMBER/NUMBER. For instance, John Stuart Mill’s autobiography is available from PG in Plucker format as http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/plucker/10378/10378. On my laptop, I usually use “.plkr” as an extension for Plucker ebooks, but if you want to transfer them to a Palm, I believe the Hotsync software will insist on your using “.pdb” as the file extension.

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 13:05:05 +0000

Ayrkain, Bob and Dan–thanks for those ZIP-related pointers. I’ll welcome yet others…plus people’s tips and other thoughts on Plucker. Anyone a regular user? Why or why not? Branko, don’t you own a Palm? Thanks. – David

By: Bob Russell

Bob Russell — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 12:30:00 +0000

IZArc works well for me.
http://www.izarc.org/index2.html

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 10:58:55 +0000

Plucker, yes, is hardly the only way to make PG books look better and bypass the line wrap problem. If you’re runnning a desktop, one possiblity might be yBook, which works on the plain ASCII. Meanwhile, Branko, I’ll look forward to your tutorial–with Palm owners kept in mind. Thanks! Some newbies out there will be grateful, I’m sure. – David