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Better-looking Project Gutenberg books: An easy guide to the Plucker viewer for Palm users
July 30, 2006 | 3:24 am
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By David Rothman
For years I’ve despaired that many literary classics from Project Gutenberg are available only in ASCII. That means no boldface, no italics and other amenities when reading these books on your Palm handheld.
The demise of Blackmask, offering a number of formats, did not help.
The Plucker format is hardly the end-all and be-all for Palm owners, but it’s far, far better than plain text–in terms of typographical amenities. A bunch of PG books are now in Plucker but not in HTML.
But how to use Plucker? For newbies, here is a very quick and very dirty how-to, which old Plucker hands are welcome to expand and correct:
1. Download and unzip the Palm viewer. Here’s a zipped Windows version that I used with my Palm TX Handheld. This one is for a Window desktop, which you’ll use to transfer the reader software to your handheld. Check the Plucker download page for other possibilities. If you lack ZIP, you can get a free eval version of PKZIP.
2. Once you’ve unzipped Plucker, install the viewer program and the accompanying instructions. Don’t worry about other stuff.
3. Do the usual HotSync on your handheld and call up Plucker from your App menu.
4. If you run across a PG book in Plucker, you can request a simple conversion into that format. Your fill in the number of the book. When you click download, your Palm install software will come up.
5. Once again, do the HotSync routine.
Yes, Plucker has all kinds of goodies to transfer HTML pages, RSS items, etc., to your Palm, including this Windows version, which also includes a viewer. But for now I wanted to skip the extras and just help you get going with the basics.
Note: I’d also recommend Manybooks.net and GutenTalk as sources of PG books in better-looking formats than ASCII. But they do not include all PG books.
How to get the terrorism report in Plucker format: Here, from David A. Desrosiers.
ZIP gurus: What are other good sources besides PKZIP, which, alas, after the trial period, is not free?
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Comments:
WinRAR will keep giving reminders but doesn’t expire. Works on ZIPs, RARs, and more.
http://www.rarlab.com/
7-Zip is free and open source, you can get it from http://www.7-zip.org
It’s trivially easy to create at least a somewhat better looking e-book from Project Gutenberg plain vanilla text editions, and if you use sites such as Manybooks.net, most of the work has already been done for you. Not to mention that I know of at least three or four tools that will do the work for you. (Most if not all will convert to HTML, but once you’ve got HTML, you’re in the driving seat.)
If you want, however, I could write a tutorial-like thingy that outlines the process. Perhaps others could then chime in with some typographic advice, because that is not my strong suit.
BTW, I think that for many people the looks of the books is less of an issue than the fact that they cannot conveniently rewrap the text.
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
IZArc works well for me.
http://www.izarc.org/index2.html
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
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.
Memoware also has a nice collection of books in Plucker format.
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.
“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
“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.”
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
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.
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.
I will-thanks, Bill. – David
[Update: I did, and it looked great. So did your Alice in Wonderland.]
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
@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
The more the merrier, Georg. Thanks! – David