software

EPub and Word Processors

Well. Got your heart medicine handy? Jeff is considering a Mac. Well, not exactly. (Put down that nitroglycerine.) I’m strongly considering getting an iPad. And I’ll bet you didn’t know that I already have an iPod, thanks to Jim Strickland, who may in fact persuade me to get a Mac someday. I worry about some of Apple’s cultural issues (like not providing clear guidelines on what you can sell in their stores and what you can’t, and changing your &!$#*% mind about it every other week) but their engineering is extremely good. I spent some quality time with an iPad at a recent Enclave Meetup, and basically, I’m sold. Those guys pretty much nailed the ebook experience, or at very least came up with the best possible compromise between fixed-page and reflowable presentation that anyone might strike. And I want my books out there in the iBooks marketplace.

This means that I need to be able to create EPub files, and good ones. What boggles me is the scarcity of visual tools for that purpose. Among the mainline desktop publishing apps, only InDesign CS4 and CS5 can export finished EPub files, and some people think the feature itself isn’t finished yet. (I don’t have either version so I can’t do my own testing–and at $700 for the app, I don’t expect to get it.) Some odd comments I’ve seen online suggest that the Scribus developers don’t think that reflowable document export is a suitable task for a fixed-layout desktop pubber, and that they’re not going to do it. There are lots of converter programs for taking various types of files and turning them into EPubs. As best I can tell, most people code their EPubs up manually, as though they were writing a C++ program. Gakkh. But also as best I can tell, affordable WYSIWYG EPub editors begin and end with Sigil.

The format itself is not a skullcracker. You’ve got one or more XHTML files expressing content (plus image files, if present), one or more CSS files defining styles, and one or more XML files describing document structure and metadata, all placed in a container file that’s not much more than a .zip with a different extension. There’s an optional DRM layer in the spec, but it’s technology-agnostic and not much used. The spec is simple enough so that people write the damned things by hand. I can’t imagine that parsing and generating the XML/XHTML/CSS would strain any sort of editor.

My point here is that you don’t need a fixed-layout desktop publishing program like InDesign or Quark to create and maintain EPub ebooks. In a sense, EPub is a modern XML-based word processor file spec, and even a middling WYSIWYG word processor could be twisted a little bit to read, render, edit, and write EPub files that could be loaded right into iBooks without further processing.

Sigil comes close. I’m using it and I’m reasonably impressed, considering that the team is basically writing a brand-new word processor from scratch. What boggles me is that it’s the only WYSIWYG EPub editor in the universe. And as a word processor, well, it’s pretty spare.

There’s no reason for this. Existing word processing apps like OpenOffice Writer and AbiWord could easily be extended to import and export EPub files, or forked to create a ramcharged ebook development system using EPub as its primary file format. Fork or not, I’m convinced of this: All word processors will eventually become ebook editors. The ebook market is closing in on reality. We now have the file format we need. The software will follow.

But sheesh guys, how about picking up the pace a little!

Odd Lots

Jun 4th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

I’m not very good at one-liners. So, in my contrarian fashion, I will present an Odd Lots composed entirely of…two-liners.
Technical material (textbooks, manuals, computer books) rendered on an ebook reader? Now you’re talking.
As someone fond of both astronomy (especially telescopes) and Star Wars, I consider this a wonderful building hack.
Harrison Bergeron was evidently a Canadian kid soccer player. (Thanks to Bob Trembley for the link.)
What’s your favorite app for extracting text from PDFs? Any experience with ABBYY’s PDF Transformer?
And if you’re going the other way, slow but sure pays off: PDFCreator has finally reached version 1.0, after only seven years.
Sigil is the only WYSIWIYG editor for EPUB-format ebooks. Why? When will we start editing ebooks and stop coding them?
One of my cousins once had a sandbox in an enormous worn-out tractor tire. Now somebody’s recycled such a tire into a bike.

Odd Lots

May 29th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

As I polish up this Odd Lots, I see that Sectorlink.com is down, which is significant to me since they host duntemann.com and copperwood.com. Have no idea what’s going on yet, nor how long the outage has existed. (I was over at one of Carol’s friends’ rebuilding some very ad-hoc tomato shelters in honor of George Ewing until an hour or so ago.) If some of my pages are inaccessible, it’s not about me; it’s the whole damned hosting service.
We lost Martin Gardner the other day, at 95. Amazing man, something like a technical Colin Wilson, who wrote the “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American for 25 years, edited Humpty Dumpty’s Magazine for Little Children (which I read circa 1957-59) and cranked out books for most of his life. Every one I’ve read has been terrific, and I especially endorse Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957) and The Annotated Alice (1960.) I should look for a few more.
Art Linkletter too, who made it to 97. It was in Linkletter’s very funny book Kids Sure Rite Funny that I found the wonderful kid-quote: “Now that dinosaurs are safely dead, we can call them clumsy and stupid.” The book’s copyright was not renewed and it is now in the public domain; you can read it online or get free ebook copies in various formats here.
The problem with how to carry your iPad made it all the way to the Wall Street Journal, which devoted an A-head story to the issue. My correspondents (including a couple who have the iPad) think a belt holster is unrealistic. Best iCartage solution I’ve seen so far (including a photo endorsement from Woz himself) is the Scott eVest, with 22 hidden pockets, including one custom-designed for the iPad.
Then again, there’s some unexplored form factor territory between smartphones and iPads. I find the Dell Streak (formerly the Mini 5) intriguing for its size/shape alone. (Here’s an interesting perspective on display size from Engadget.) The 5-inch model that will launch later this year (and in the UK on June 4, I hear) is about the size of an old HP scientific pocket calculator, and in the fevered days of my youth alpha geeks carried those around in leather belt holsters. Even the rumored 7-inch version could be belt-holstered with some care; beyond that it gets dicey. (Dell supposedly has a 10-incher in development.)
After asking mobile developer David Beers about his thoughts on the Android OS, I discovered that Google will let you download an Android LiveCD so you can mess around with the OS on an ordinary Intel PC without having to lay out for an actual mobile device.
That unpronounceable volcano in Iceland, perhaps fearing that the world was starting to get bored with it, blew a volcanic smoke ring the other day. Many people, perhaps thinking that smoking may be hazardous to a volcano’s health, are cheering it on.
After several calm days here, the winds came up again yesterday morning. As Carol and I were driving back from Walgreen’s, we saw dust clouds crossing Broadmoor Bluffs in front of us on several occasions. It’s dry here, and construction sites generate a lot of brown dust, true. But then the winds calmed for a few seconds before starting up again, and when they did, we saw a large pine tree shake in the wind and let go a thick cloud of yellow dust. Pine pollen by the pound. No wonder I can barely breathe.

Odd Lots

May 20th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Jupiter has always looked better with a few belts, but now, astonishingly enough, one of them has gone missing.
Ever want a stuffed muon? Head right over to the Particle Zoo, where that and many other cuddly plush species of atomic debris can be had, including a few (like the tachyon) that have never been observed and probably don’t exist. Oh, you can get stuffed dark matter too–and does that Higgs Boson look happily stoned or what?
I’d heard about it a while ago, but only recently began reading up on the Haiku OS, inspired by ahead-of-its-time BeOS. What intrigued me is Haiku’s inherent suitability for multicore CPUs, since it’s pervasively multithreaded, and damned near every piece of an app is spun off into a separate thread. Alpha release 2 is now available. I’ve downloaded the ISO and will report back here when I test it on my quad core.
One of the more interesting issues involving the iPad is where to put it: Do all of us macho geeks need to get used to carrying man-purses? Hardly. We wore our leather-holstered slide rules on our hips like mathematical six-guns back in the 60s. A quick check online showed nothing comparable for the iPad and its inevitable imitators, but trust me: Leather belt holsters for slates will be the Christmas gift in 2010. Draw, pardner! Whoops. Visio isn’t available for the iPad yet. Surf, pardner!
The Hong Kong knockoff artists are beginning to fill the Fake iPad niche, and according to Wired may well clone the Google Android slate before Google even admits that it exists.
And Bill Roper sent a link to a barely $100 Android slate shaped to better fit your stylish black leather belt holster. With one of the new Android-based e-reader software packages like FBReader and Aldiko, a gadget like that could serve as a socko indoor ebook reader.
From Pete Albrecht comes a link to Lehman’s, a vendor offering mostly non-electrical products and catering (presumably) to an Amish clientele. (Preppers too, I suspect.) An amazing number of items in the catalog (the red rubber hot water bottle, for example) were commonplaces in my youth, and some (like the strangely retro-deco Stirling engine fans) would be right at home on planet Hell from my novel, where electrical devices don’t work. All in all, a fascinating flip.
The May 2010 Scientific American published an article suggesting that carbohydrates may be worse for you than saturated fats. This is not news to me (when I eat carbs I gain weight rapidly, and lose just as rapidly when I stop) but it’s encouraging to see a “big-time” publication take the notion seriously. After all, the Federal government has been telling us that fat makes us fat for thirty years now, and all we could do in response has been to…get fatter. I’ve doubled my fat intake in the last year or two, and have remained at my customary 155 pounds. Something’s screwy somewhere. (Found via The Volokh Conspiracy. Read the comments; amazingly good signal-to-noise ratio there.)

Odd Lots

Apr 30th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

Well, Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx is out there, but I had other committments yesterday and couldn’t download it on Day One. This may have been a good thing; there was a last-minute bootloader bug that interefered with dual-booting with Windows. Still, I’ll be installing it on one machine or another ASAP and will report here.
Tom’s Hardware posted a solid comparison of Linux office apps yesterday, and if you’re considering Linux for day-to-day work, it’s worth a close read.
I got the Audiveris sheet music OCR app installed the other night, and it does work–however, it requires 300 DPI sheet music scans in order to operate, and none of the ragtime sheet music I found online was anything close to that high-resolution. (I tested it using high-res example scans installed with the app.) As with most Java apps, it is agonizingly slow: It took seven seconds to pop up a simple Save As dialog, on a 3.2 GHz SX270 with 1 GB RAM. I also had trouble getting audio output via its MIDI support; however, after saving the generated MIDI to a disk file, the MIDI file played normally through several different player apps.
Rich Rostrom did send me a link to another composition by Irene Giblin, the author of the Ketchup Rag: The Chicken Chowder Rag. Here’s a video of an ancient record playing it, and another (far better) video of a piano roll of the song playing on a player piano. Here’s a short bio of the long-lived composer…and (finally) a MIDI file of the Ketchup Rag itself.
ZDNet posted one of the better ebook reader evaluations I’ve seen lately, and while it appears to be Kindle vs. iPad, it’s really e-ink vs. backlit LCD. I’m currently with LCD. I don’t read outside for many reasons, including a lack of comfortable chairs out there, and a feeling that if I’m outside I should be walking or climbing or digging or something.
Making large numbers of books portable is what the ebook thing is all about. Here’s another approach: Climb inside your circular bookshelf and start walking.
Of course there’s lots of 2010 still ahead of us, but charts from the NOAA indicate that severe weather in the first four months of the year has fallen to what looks like a ten-year low.
The post was 23 days late, but better late than never: Fear the homeopathic bomb!

Daywander

Apr 28th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

We’re going to see just how fat our pipes are tomorrow, when Canonical cranks open the spigot for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. It’s an LTS release, and I’m guessing that a lot more people will be grabbing it than usual. I may download it just to see how well the torrent works on Day One; in fact, I have a new hard drive on the shelf for my SX270 here and if abundant time presents itself this week (possible) I may swap in the new drive and install the release. This is the second-to-last machine I have that still uses the System Commander bootloader app, and I’d really much rather have grub everywhere.

Other pipes will also be in play: We got a note from the condo association last week telling us that the water will be shut off for eight hours tomorrow while the plumbers fix our backflow valves. We may fill the bathtub for emergencies tomorrow morning, but I suspect that Carol and I will go shopping (there’s a Mephisto store in Deerfield) and then stop over at Gretchen and Bill’s to run the dogs and take a bathroom break.

Interestingly, the sunspot machine more or less shut down two weeks ago, after switching on roughly January 1 and keeping a spot or two (though mostly small ones) in view almost all the time since then. Some have been predicting a double bottom to the current solar minimum, and if we run a long stretch of spotless days going forward, this may be Bottom 2.

Speaking of double bottoms…while I was in the checkout line at Bed, Bath & Beyond the other day buying Tassimo coffee disks, I was confronted with a POS display for a product called BootyPop. I guess the best way to describe it is a padded bra for your butt. Really; I write SF, not fantasy, and couldn’t make up anything that bizarre.

We had dinner with the family the other night at Portillo’s in Crystal Lake, and whenever we eat at a place like that, I wander around gaping at what I call “junkwalls”–old stuff tacked to the wallboard to make the place look atmospheric and (in this case) 1925-ish. Close to our table was a framed piece of sheet music for a song called “Ketchup Rag.” It was published in 1910 and is now in the public domain, and you can see the piece here. Writing entire songs about condiments seemed peculiar, but once I got online, I discovered that ragtime had an affinity for food, and there were in fact a Cucumber Rag, a Red Onion Rag, an Oyster Rag, and a Pickled Beets Rag, among many, many others. I confess a curiosity as to what the Ketchup Rag sounds like (it’s a complicated piece, that’s for sure) and discovered to my abject delight that there is such a thing as sheet music OCR. One example that particularly intrigues me is Audiveris, a Java app that can evidently scarf down a PDF and spit out a MIDI file. I’m downloading it even as I type, and with some luck will get it working later this evening. If it works (or even if it doesn’t) you’ll see a summary in the next Odd Lots.

CBZ Files as Image Archives

Apr 7th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Last fall, I gathered a stack of Alma-Tadema‘s paintings from my pre-1923 images folder, wrapped them up into a ZIP file, and sent them to a friend who was looking for a copyright-free color cover for a novel. Some weeks ago, I learned that the CBZ (Comic Book Zip) file format is nothing more than a ZIP file with a different extension. I downloaded and installed a free CBZ reader called Comical. After changing the extension on the Alma-Tadema archive to .cbz, I double-clicked on it, and boom! There it was, beautifully presented and trivially easy to click through. And if you change the extension back to .zip, you can de-archive the images in the usual fashion using any ZIP-capable archiver. It’s all in the extension; no changes to the binary archive need to be made.

Not being a comics guy, I’d never heard of the CBZ format, though it’s been around since 2004. It’s basically an ebook reader protocol (since it is, after all, simply an ordinary ZIP archive) that opens a .zip file and displays the files in alpha order by filename. If the files are displayable as images, the reader displays them. If the files are not displayable as images, a well-behaved reader will ignore them. (Comical, one of the simplest free readers, sometimes crashes when it encounters a non-image binary.) If you need an indicia page, some readers will display text if it’s in an .nfo file. The .nfo will appear in a separate text window on opening the file, rather than in the page display area.

I’ve tested four free CBZ readers: ComicRack and Comical under Windows, and QComicBook and Comix under Linux. All but ComicRack are open-source. ComicRack is overkill in a lot of ways, though it works very well. (It requires the .NET framework, if that’s significant to you.) Comical is much simpler, and my only gripes are that it doesn’t display .nfo files, and it crashes when it finds certain kinds of non-displayable files in a .cbz archive. QComicBook is a Qt4/KDE app, and the one I find myself using under Linux. Comix (a Python app) works well but is not as capable as QComicBook. (Feature-wise, it’s on a par with Comical.) Others exist. Okular will open CBZ files without complaint, but it simply scrolls vertically through the images without attempting to show one per click.

Most of the comic book readers also read CBR and CBT files, which are RAR and TAR archives, respectively, and work almost exactly the same way. (I haven’t tested those formats.)

The CBZ system works best when all the images in the archive are the same dimensions and aspect ratios. I’m putting together some photo albums for showing the folks back home that are collections of digital photographs in one (big) .cbz file. The bigness is mostly unavoidable, since JPG files don’t compress very well. Still, it makes file management simpler

Here are some sample CBZ archives that I put together for testing: Alma-Tadema (14 MB). Hi-Flier Kite Catalog 1977 (6 MB). The “Elf” Space-Charge Receiver (1.7 MB).

Odd Lots

Apr 4th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

A lot of Catholics (and doubtless a few others) would like to see some rabbit control on Easter.
That said, Easter has done much better resisting commercialism than Christmas. Basically, the Christmas story is unreservedly delightful, whereas the Easter story is sobering. Happy beginnings are easier to come by and much more common than happy endings, as I’ve noted here before. The real message of Easter is solidarity with God, who is born, lives, suffers, and dies, like all of us–with the promise of a happy ending, even if the nature of that happy ending is obscure to us right here and right now.
Early reports of Amazon giving in to demands from major publishers that they be able to set prices for their ebooks were evidently premature, but I’ve seen more reliable reports that the deal is now done, and that ebook prices will rise. This is not a bad thing: Publishers should compete on price, not retailers. And if Macmillan wants to charge $15 for an ebook, that provides some wiggle room for upstart and smaller publishers to get a place in the channel charging $10, or $8, or $5.
Many photos have just gone up for EntConnect 2010.
Ubuntu 10.10’s code name will be Maverick Meerkat. And hearing that reminded me that Lucid Lynx is just around the cornah. (The small photo of some meerkats devouring a Halloween pumpkin is worth the click!)
I’ve been having some very odd problems creating good audio CDs with InfraRecorder Portable, and now recommend that you don’t use it. Some of the tracks just don’t “take,” but when I burn the very same MP3s to a blank disc from the same spindle using Gnome app Brasero, the disc is perfect.
It’s far from complete but it’s a damned good start: A listing of electronics surplus houses by state. Sadly, they don’t list Apache Reclamation & Electronics, which suggests that Phoenix’s Mother of All Junkpiles has passed into history.
From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Mumblecore, a film genre characterized by improvised scripts, inexperienced actors, and lousy video equipment. (Sounds like my home movies.)

Odd Lots

Mar 26th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

Here’s a great article from NASA on the unexpected success it’s had with the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) spacecraft in spotting previously unknown asteroids in the infrared spectrum. WISE is detecting hundreds of new asteroids every day, which is unnerving, since a rock no bigger than a Motel 6 could cause regional devastation greater than any nuclear weapon yet produced.
From Larry Nelson comes a pointer to the AirStash, an interesting $100 USB Wi-Fi gadget that can accept up to a 32 GB SD card and act as a content server over Wireless b/g. Anthough nominally a thumb drive, the USB plug also charges the internal battery, and (though it’s not screamed from the rooftops) the thingie works all by itself, no computer connection required. This suggests “wearable file sharing”: Drop one in your pocket and nearby people can download files from the device without having any idea where it actually is. Little by little, the jiminy (an AI wearable computer I thought up in 1983, and figured would be mature by 2027) creeps toward realization. The AI is actually the tough part; everything else already exists, if not in as small a package as I imagined 25 years ago.
And if you ever wanted to run Linux on one of your fillings (ok, one of your elephant’s fillings) this would be the solution. (Thanks to Bill Cherepy for the link.)
Here’s a gadget that builds you an external USB storage device by dropping in (literally) a naked SATA hard drive. I may not need it, but I admire the elegance of the concept.
I’ve been arguing in favor of dual-screen reader devices for years, and this one is a good start. Sounds like the user interface software needs work…but when has that not been an issue for a first-gen device? We’re closing in on it, though.
Nice status update on some of the current non-Tokamak fusion research approaches, link thanks to Frank Glover.
Also from Frank comes a reasonable article on how people would die in a vacuum and how they wouldn’t. I had heard of lung shredding; heart failure was new to me. But take, um, heart: Your blood wouldn’t boil.
If you ever wondered why you cry when you slice onions, well, it’s the sulfuric acid released by cells in the onion when they’re cut open. Supposedly living things evolved this mechanism (or at least key parts of it) half a billion years ago. Onions evolved their chemical weapons to avoid being laid on hamburgers in slices–but we evolved Vidalias to prove that we were smarter than onions, and that fast food will prevail against all threats.
Interestingly, the Canon G11 camera reduces the size of the image sensor to 10 megapixels, down from the 12.5 on the G10. The new sensor gives you fewer pixels but better ones, and faster, which is all for the best.
Burger King is testing a new retailing feature in Brazil. When you order a burger, they take your picture and print your face on the burger wrapper.

Odd Lots

Feb 24th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

Here’s the best discussion I’ve yet seen on why Flash may never work well–or perhaps at all–on touchscreen devices like the iPad.
Most recent laser printers have Ethernet ports, and some older printers (like my Laserjet 2100TN) can accept a JetDirect network adapter. Installing a printer on a network port means you don’t have to worry about whether the machine it’s attached to is turned on. If you’d like to do this but you’re not a network geek, here’s the best XP-based step-by-step on the topic I’ve ever run across. Same tutorial for Windows 2000.
Bruce Baker passed me a link to a nice item on the issue of broadening publisher book production to allow all formats to be generated from a single master file. Follow and read the link to The New Sleekness as well. Pablo should take it down a notch; XML is not a markup language; it’s a general mechanism for creating markup languages, and what may happen eventually (perhaps in ten years or so) is a standard book-production markup language derived from XML and built into a new generation of word processors. Still, what nobody in either article mentions is the problem of pages verses reflowable, which is the 9 trillion pound gorilla in the business. If you don’t solve that problem, absolutely nothing else matters. (And it is not as easy to solve as some may claim–I’ve been thinking about it for several years now and see no solution whatsoever on the horizon .)
Kompozer 0.8b2 has been released. I just got it installed in a VM and will be poking at it in coming days. According to Kaz, most of the changes are code cleanups, but any progress on the editor is a fine, fine thing.
I’ve done model rocketry here and there over the (many) years, and I’ve seen some very odd things lofted on D engines. Back in high school, my friend George built a Harecules Guided Muscle (which was from the Beany & Cecil cartoon show) in the form of a big whittled balsa wood fist on a short, thick body. I’m amazed it flew as well as it did. Well, here’s a fire-’em-together pack of 8 rockets shaped and colored like Crayola crayons. The guy took his time (six years) but he did a great job–and created a spectacular Web page documenting the project.
We rarely go to WalMart, but last time we did, I picked up a bottle of Diet Mountain Lightning. It has nothing on Kroger’s Diet Citrus Drop, easily the best of all the Diet Mountain Dew clones I’ve ever had the opportunity to try.