Bhakta Jim's Blog: Bhakta Jim's Bhagavatam Class

So where do I get old books to put back into print?

Fri, 12 Nov 2021 16:56:29 -0800

The first thing you need to understand about putting old books back into print is that you don't need to actually own any old books to do it. There are websites containing photographed old book pages which have already been converted into text using optical character recognition. Anyone who wants to can download this text and the page images and turn them into a print-ready book using the techniques I have described.

One of the best is the Internet Archive at . They have 33 million books in their collection, most of them in the public domain.

A newer effort to do much the same thing is Google Books at .

Books from either of these sources will require hand correcting text. OCR does a surprisingly good job of turning printed book pages into plain text, but it isn't perfect. You may also have to deal with errors in the original text. I publish a number of Hindu scriptures which were translated to English but printed in India in the late eighteen hundreds. Proofreaders who were fluent in English may have been in short supply back then, because the published texts contained thousands of errors in spelling and punctuation.

What I generally do is to create a donation to Project Gutenberg, which publishes free e-books for books old enough to be in the public domain. Project Gutenberg has volunteers called "whitewashers" (a reference to Tom Sawyer) who examine my donations for errors that I missed using automated tools. I run these same tools against my own donations and correct the errors that they find, but I have yet to submit a donation where the whitewasher did not find errors I missed. Sometimes they find so many it is embarrassing.

However, the texts that finally make it into Project Gutenberg are of very high quality. Any one of them could be turned into a print on demand book with very little effort.

There are some unscrupulous persons who take free e-books from Project Gutenberg and sell them on amazon.com. Selling print on demand titles, where I have spent many hours turning the raw text and images of the e-book into something you would be proud to have on your bookshelf is one thing. Taking someone else's work and selling it is quite another.

The page I look at in the PG website most often is this one:

This page shows the latest titles to be added to the site. If you check this out every week or so you will be quite impressed with the variety of books being transcribed and donated. Of course they have all the classics, but that is only the beginning of what you'll find there.

The last source of old books is used book stores, library sales, and eBay. These will of course be actual printed books. How can you put these back into print? Well, it turns out I have written a book on the subject for the One Laptop Per Child project, which you can read for free here:

posted by Bhakta Jim on November, 12

Footnotes and Captions in LaTeX

Thu, 11 Nov 2021 14:38:08 -0800

If you're putting an older book back into print you're going to have to deal with footnotes. Footnotes belong on the bottom of the page where they are referenced. Really long footnotes might be split across two pages. LaTeX is good at dealing with this, given the right sort of encouragement.

If your book has short paragraphs and few footnotes what rst2latex generates from RST footnote notation will be just fine. Just put the footnote right after the paragraph that refers to it like this:

RST

that I had been chosen to represent America at
Rheims. [#]_

.. [#] It is interesting to note that Lieutenant Frank P. Lahm, the sole American entrant for the Gordon Bennett Balloon Cup in 1906; Mr. Edgar Mix, the only representative of America in the balloon contest in 1909, and Mr. Charles Weymann, the only entrant from America in the Gordon Bennett Aviation Cup race of 1911, held in England, all won.

TEX

that I had been chosen to represent America at
Rheims.\DUfootnotemark{id1}{id2}{1}
%
\DUfootnotetext{id2}{id1}{1}{%
It is interesting to note that Lieutenant Frank P. Lahm, the sole American entrant for the Gordon Bennett Balloon Cup in 1906; Mr. Edgar Mix, the only representative of America in the balloon contest in 1909, and Mr. Charles Weymann, the only entrant from America in the Gordon Bennett Aviation Cup race of 1911, held in England, all won.
}

Unfortunately, some books have paragraphs that go on for pages and have multiple footnote references within them. What rst2latex generates will NOT put the footnotes where you want them to be. You will need to change the notation to this format:

Om!\footnote{This mystic monosyllable plays a prominent part in Sanskrit scriptural literature. Composed, according to some, of the letters a, u, and ma signifying Brahmā, Creator; Vishnu, Preserver; and Siva, Destroyer;—it expresses the three in One; and is said to possess great power spiritually.—T.} Salutation unto Vāsudeva!

The notation is simpler than what it replaces. Just put \footnote{} where you want the footnote to be referenced and put the text of the footnote inside the curly braces.

Next we need to deal with picture captions, which older books frequently have. Picture in LaTeX get put where LaTeX wants them to go. It will move them in the middle of paragraphs if it thinks the pages will break more nicely that way. LaTeX is mostly used for formatting scholarly papers and image captions are given numbers like Figure 1.1, etc. You can put a list of figures in your book with one LaTeX command.

That's the good news. The bad news is that LaTeX numbers figures in a different way than your book does. It wants to number them N.n where the first N is chapter number and the second n is the sequence number within the chapter. Older books don't use that system. They tend to number from the start of the book to the end, and may include frontspieces and plates that are not numbered at all. So in your LaTeX header we put this directive:

\usepackage[justification=centering]{caption}
\usepackage{caption}
\captionsetup{font=footnotesize,labelformat=empty}

This tells LaTeX to center your captions, use the same font as used for footnotes, and do not label the captions with Figure N.n like it would do by default. So your images will be specified like this:

\begin{figure}
\noindent\makebox[\linewidth][c]{\includegraphics[width=4.5in]{images/Image1.jpg}}

\caption{CURTISS' HUDSON RIVER FLIGHT OVER THE STATUE OF LIBERTY\\
Copyright, 1910, by The Pictorial News Co.}
\end{figure}

When you do a list of figures like this:

\clearpage{\pagestyle{empty}\cleardoublepage}

\tableofcontents %put toc in

\clearpage{\pagestyle{empty}\cleardoublepage}

\listoffigures

\mainmatter

the captions will be numbered in the list, but NOT in the actual caption of the image. You can live with that.

Last chapter: where to get old books to put back into print. Stay tuned.

posted by Bhakta Jim on November, 11

Illustrations in LaTeX.

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 15:44:24 -0700

Illustrations for print on demand titles should be 300 DPI and close to the size in inches that it will be in the book. Generally the best way to get these images will be to download a PDF of the book and page through it with Adobe Acrobat or another PDF viewing program. Do a right-click on the image in a page and select Save Image As... One of two things will happen:

1. The picture in the document will be saved to a file using the JPG format.

2. The entire page will be saved as an image file.

Generally speaking (but not always) a photograph will be saved as an image by itself, and a black and white drawing will be saved as an image of the entire page.

Images in PDFs will be well compressed and smaller than images you would get by photographing the pages and trying to do JPEG compression, for example.

If you got your PDF from Google books the images should already be cleaned up and white balanced. If you got it from archive.org the pages will be yellowed and in need of clean up. A free program you can use for this purpose is called The GIMP.

The best way to clean up photographs is to use the White Balance filter. Black and white line drawings can be made to look new using the Threshold filter.

To put the image into your RST file you use lines like this:

.. figure:: images/image146.jpg
:align: center
:scale: 85 %
:alt: FIG. 146.—Diagram showing how a wireless telephone transmitting system is arranged.

FIG. 146.—Diagram showing how a wireless telephone transmitting system is arranged.

When you convert to LaTeX it will look like this:

\begin{figure}
\noindent\makebox[\linewidth][c]{\includegraphics[scale=0.850000]{images/image146.jpg}}
\caption{FIG. 146.—Diagram showing how a wireless telephone transmitting system is arranged.}
\end{figure}

You can improve this by replacing [scale=0.850000] with [width=\textwidth] to make the image fit inside the left and right margins. You can also specify a width, like this: [width=4.5in]

LaTeX will put the image wherever it thinks it should go. It might stick it in the middle of a paragraph, for example. You might need to move the image between different paragraphs to put it in a place you can live with. Positioning images in a LaTeX document requires trial and error. There are good resources on the internet to explain what options you have in positioning images, so I'm not going to try and explain that here.

If you want to get fancy and have text wrap to the left or right of your illustrations that is possible. You need to do something like this:

\begin{wrapfigure}{r}{0.5\textwidth}
\begin{center}
{\includegraphics[width=2.5in]{images/Image3.jpg}
\\Fig. 3. Montgolfier Balloon}
\end{center}
\end{wrapfigure}

Be aware that if you do this LaTeX will be worse than it usually is in positioning images. You will likely find that some images begin on one page and finish on the next.

The thing to keep in mind is that LaTeX is deciding how the pages will look. Not you. You can give it hints and that's about it. However, the end result can be worth it.

Next: working with footnotes.

posted by Bhakta Jim on November, 01

Parts, chapters, sections and subsections in LaTeX

Sat, 23 Oct 2021 19:08:49 -0700

The next step in fixing up your TEX file is to replace \section tags with either \chapter or \part, depending on if your book is divided up into Books or Parts or just has chapters.

You then need to replace \subsection with either \chapter or \section, depending on what the second level headings of your book represent.

\part headings create a page that has the Part title centered vertically on the page. The Part begins on a right hand page and is followed by a blank page. Neither page has headings or footers. The word "Part" followed by a number is the first line of the heading, which means that this same content should not be in the Part heading.

\chapter headings create a right hand page with no page headings or footers and the chapter title begins some distance below the top of the page. The word "Chapter" followed by a number is on a line above the actual chapter heading, so it should not be repeated in that heading.

If your book is divided into Parts or Books you might expect the chapters to be numbered within each Part, like this:

Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Part 2
Chapter 1
Chapter 2

In fact that will not happen. The chapters will be numbered like this:

Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Part 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

It is best to just leave this alone.

\section and \subsection do not cause page breaks.

If you have a table of contents or a list of figures you'll need to run the xelatex command twice to get the page numbers for each put in correctly. You need to delete some files created during the first run of the command before doing another first run of the command or these files will cause errors. I created a script (like a .BAT file) to delete these files then run xelatex twice:

#/bin/sh
rm *.log
rm *.aux
rm *.pdf
rm *.toc
xelatex TheCurtissAviationBook.tex
xelatex TheCurtissAviationBook.tex

Once you do these steps your PDF should start looking like a real book interior.

Next step: dealing with illustrations. Stay tuned.

posted by Bhakta Jim on October, 23

Making front matter in LaTeX

Wed, 20 Oct 2021 14:50:09 -0700

"Front Matter" is all the stuff that comes before the text of the book proper and includes such things as:

1. Title page
2. Verso
3. Frontspiece
4. Introduction
5. Table of Contents
6. List of Illustrations
7. Dedication

and so on. Front matter generally has its own set of page numbers, usually in lower case roman numerals (i, ii, iii, iv, v, etc.)

RST has syntax for chapters, sections, subsections, etc. but doesn't really handle front matter. You need to do things like center text on a title page, make the font of the title larger, not print headings on title pages, etc. LaTeX can do this nicely.

Let's look at the front matter of a book I recently published:

%%% Body
\begin{document}
\frontmatter

\title{The Curtiss Aviation Book%
\label{the-curtiss-aviation-book}}
\author{}
\date{}
\maketitle

\clearpage
\thispagestyle{empty}

\begin{figure}
\noindent\makebox[\linewidth][c]{\includegraphics[width=4.5in]{images/Image1.jpg}}

\caption{CURTISS' HUDSON RIVER FLIGHT OVER THE STATUE OF LIBERTY\\
Copyright, 1910, by The Pictorial News Co.}
\end{figure}

\clearpage{\pagestyle{empty}\cleardoublepage}
\thispagestyle{empty}

{\centering
{\Huge\strut{THE CURTISS AVIATION BOOK
}}
\endgraf}
\par

\vs{2}
{\centering
{\normalsize\strut{BY
}}
\endgraf}
\par

{\centering
{\Large\strut{GLENN H. CURTISS
}}
\endgraf}
\par

{\centering
{\normalsize\strut{AND
}}
\endgraf}
\par

{\centering
{\Large\strut{AUGUSTUS POST
}}
\endgraf}
\par

\vs{2}
{\centering
{\large\strut{WITH CHAPTERS BY CAPTAIN PAUL W. BECK, U. S. A.\\
LIEUTENANT THEODORE G. ELLYSON, U. S. N.\\
AND HUGH ROBINSON

}}
\endgraf}
\par

\vs{2}
{\centering
{\normalsize\strut{\emph{With Numerous Illustrations from Photographs}
}}
\endgraf}
\par

\vspace*{\fill}
{\centering
{\normalsize\strut{NEW YORK
}}
\endgraf}
\par

{\centering
{\large\strut{FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
}}
\endgraf}
\par

{\centering
{\normalsize\strut{PUBLISHERS
}}
\endgraf}
\par

\clearpage
\thispagestyle{empty}

{\centering
{\Large{ISBN: 9798495501010}}
\endgraf}
\par

\vs{2}
{\centering
{\normalsize\strut{\emph{Copyright, 1912, by}
}}
\endgraf}
\par

{\centering
{\normalsize\strut{FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
}}
\endgraf}
\par

\vs{2}
{\centering
{\normalsize\strut{\emph{All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign}\\
\emph{languages, including the Scandinavian}
}}
\endgraf}
\par

\vs{2}
{\centering
{\normalsize\strut{October, 1912
}}
\endgraf}
\par

\clearpage
\thispagestyle{empty}

{\centering
{\large\strut{TO
}}
\endgraf}
\par

\vs{1}
{\centering
{\large\strut{MRS. MABEL G. BELL
}}
\endgraf}
\par

\vs{1}
{\centering
{\large\strut{WHO MADE POSSIBLE THE AERIAL EXPERIMENT ASSOCIATION
}}
\endgraf}
\par

\vs{1}
{\centering
{\large\strut{THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY
}}
\endgraf}
\par

\vs{1}
{\centering
{\large\strut{THE AUTHORS
}}
\endgraf}
\par

\clearpage{\pagestyle{empty}\cleardoublepage}

\tableofcontents %put toc in

\clearpage{\pagestyle{empty}\cleardoublepage}

\listoffigures

\mainmatter

\thispagestyle{empty}

You should be able to figure out most of what these lines do.

\frontmatter indicates where front matter starts and \mainmatter shows where it ends.

There are several defined sizes for text that is not a chapter or section heading, including normalsize, large, Large, huge, and Huge. These are based off the font size used for your body text, 12 pt in the example (see previous post where this is defined).

\clearpage skips to the top of a page before continuing. \thispagestyle{empty} says the new page should not have headers or footers.

vs[1] says to insert one blank line.

\vspace*{\fill} means you want to push the text following to the bottom of the current page. Very handy for title pages.

\tableofcontents inserts an automatically generated table of contents.

\listoffigures inserts an automatically generated list of illustrations. This only works if the illustrations have captions.

\begin{figure} inserts the illustration that comes before the title page, called a frontspiece. I'll have more to say about this in a future installment.

Until then, stay tuned.

posted by Bhakta Jim on October, 20

Fixing your TEX header to make your PDF suitable for book interiors

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 15:09:53 -0700

If you open your generated TEX file in your favorite text editor you'll see a bunch of lines in the beginning of the file and the last line of the bunch is this:

%%% Body

Replace all of those lines with these:

\documentclass[12pt]{book}
\usepackage{geometry}
\geometry{
papersize={7.5in,9.25in},
inner=.88in,
outer=.5in,
headheight=.5in,
bottom=.5in,
}

\title{Your Book's Title}
\author{Your Book's Author}
\date{}

\usepackage{fancyhdr}

\pagestyle{fancy}
\fancyhf{}
\fancyhead[CE]{Your Book's Title}
\fancyhead[CO]{Your Book's Author}
\fancyhead[LE,RO]{\thepage}

\fancypagestyle{plain}{%
\fancyhf{} % clear all header and footer fields to avoid page number in TOC.
\renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}
\renewcommand{\footrulewidth}{0pt}
}

\renewcommand{\chaptername}{CHAPTER}
\renewcommand{\partname}{PART}

\sloppy

% generated by Docutils
\usepackage{cmap} % fix search and cut-and-paste in Acrobat
\usepackage{ifthen}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{alltt}
\usepackage{color}
\usepackage{float} % float configuration
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{multirow}
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{0}
\usepackage{longtable,ltcaption,array}
\setlength{\extrarowheight}{2pt}
\newlength{\DUtablewidth} % internal use in tables
\usepackage{textcomp} % text symbol macros
\usepackage{verse}
\usepackage{wrapfig}

%%% Custom LaTeX preamble
% PDF Standard Fonts
\usepackage{mathptmx} % Times
\usepackage[scaled=.90]{helvet}
\usepackage{courier}

% insert vertical spacing
\def\vs#1{\vspace{#1\baselineskip}}

% define environments for most of the
% standard building blocks of a book

\def\startenv{%
\thispagestyle{empty}%
}
\def\endenv{%
}

\newenvironment{container}{}{\par}

\newenvironment{coverpage_env}{\startenv}{\endenv}
\newenvironment{frontispiece_env}{\startenv}{\endenv}
\newenvironment{titlepage_env}{\startenv}{\endenv}
\newenvironment{verso_env}{\startenv}{\endenv}
\newenvironment{dedication_env}{\startenv}{\endenv}
\newenvironment{plainpage_env}{\startenv}{\endenv}
\newenvironment{contents_env}{}{}
\newenvironment{foreword_env}{}{}
\newenvironment{preface_env}{}{}
\newenvironment{introduction_env}{}{}
\newenvironment{prologue_env}{}{}
\newenvironment{epilogue_env}{}{}
\newenvironment{glossary_env}{}{}
\newenvironment{bibliography_env}{}{}
\newenvironment{index_env}{}{}
\newenvironment{colophon_env}{}{}
\newenvironment{pgfooter_env}{}{}
\newenvironment{pgheader_env}{}{}
\newenvironment{appendix_env}{}{}

% generated by Docutils
% rubber: set program xelatex
\usepackage{fontspec}
% \defaultfontfeatures{Scale=MatchLowercase}
% straight double quotes (defined T1 but missing in TU):
\ifdefined \UnicodeEncodingName
\DeclareTextCommand{\textquotedbl}{\UnicodeEncodingName}{%
{\addfontfeatures{RawFeature=-tlig,Mapping=}\char34}}%
\fi
\usepackage{ifthen}
\usepackage{alltt}
\usepackage{color}
\usepackage[justification=centering]{caption}
\usepackage{caption}
\captionsetup{font=footnotesize,labelformat=empty}
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{0}

%%% Custom LaTeX preamble
% Linux Libertine (free, wide coverage, not only for Linux)
\setmainfont{Linux Libertine O}
\setsansfont{Linux Biolinum O}
\setmonofont[HyphenChar=None,Scale=MatchLowercase]{DejaVu Sans Mono}

%%% User specified packages and stylesheets

%%% Fallback definitions for Docutils-specific commands

% class handling for environments (block-level elements)
% \begin{DUclass}{spam} tries \DUCLASSspam and
% \end{DUclass}{spam} tries \endDUCLASSspam
\ifx\DUclass\undefined % poor man's "provideenvironment"
\newenvironment{DUclass}[1]%
{\def\DocutilsClassFunctionName{DUCLASS#1}% arg cannot be used in end-part of environment.
\csname \DocutilsClassFunctionName \endcsname}%
{\csname end\DocutilsClassFunctionName \endcsname}%
\fi

% admonition (specially marked topic)
\providecommand{\DUadmonition}[2][class-arg]{%
% try \DUadmonition#1{#2}:
\ifcsname DUadmonition#1\endcsname%
\csname DUadmonition#1\endcsname{#2}%
\else
\begin{center}
\fbox{\parbox{0.9\linewidth}{#2}}
\end{center}
\fi
}

\renewcommand*{\contentsname}{CONTENTS}
\renewcommand{\listfigurename}{ILLUSTRATIONS}

% subtitle (in document title)
\providecommand*{\DUdocumentsubtitle}[1]{{\large #1}}
% numeric or symbol footnotes with hyperlinks
\providecommand*{\DUfootnotemark}[3]{%
\raisebox{1em}{\hypertarget{#1}{}}%
\hyperlink{#2}{\textsuperscript{#3}}%
}
\providecommand{\DUfootnotetext}[4]{%
\begingroup%
\renewcommand{\thefootnote}{%
\protect\raisebox{1em}{\protect\hypertarget{#1}{}}%
\protect\hyperlink{#2}{#3}}%
\footnotetext{#4}%
\endgroup%
}

% title for topics, admonitions, unsupported section levels, and sidebar
\providecommand*{\DUtitle}[2][class-arg]{%
% call \DUtitle#1{#2} if it exists:
\ifcsname DUtitle#1\endcsname%
\csname DUtitle#1\endcsname{#2}%
\else
\smallskip\noindent\textbf{#2}\smallskip%
\fi
}
% hyperlinks:
\ifthenelse{\isundefined{\hypersetup}}{
\usepackage[colorlinks=true,linkcolor=black,urlcolor=black]{hyperref}
\usepackage{bookmark}
\urlstyle{same} % normal text font (alternatives: tt, rm, sf)
}{}
\hypersetup{
pdftitle={Your Book's Title},
}

%%% Body

I have bolded the parts of the TEX file that you will likely want to change. The first one is the page size. I have found two page sizes to be useful:

1. 6x9 inches for novels. I also use this for Hindu scriptures, and it might work for other kinds of titles like biographies, etc. This is a very common size for published books.

2. 7.5x9.25 for non fiction titles, especially illustrated ones. If your book has full page illustrations or lots of diagrams this is a good size. You can't really do full page illustrations with TEX and making the page size larger compensates for that. Also, when choosing an illustrated book to put back in print avoid color interior illustrations. A print on demand book needs to print every page the same way, so you're paying for color on every page whether the book needs it or not, and the color pages just don't look that good.

Most conventionally published books with photographs or color illustrations print the illustrations separately from the rest of the book and glue those pages into the rest of the book as part of the printing process. You can't do that with print on demand. Your pictures will look like they were printed on regular quality paper using an InkJet printer. For black and white photos this can give usable results, for color not so much.

The place for color and color illustrations is on the book cover. That is where they will look their best.

There are several places to put in your book's title and author. In the printed book left hand page headings will have the title and right hand page headings will have the author name. There are probably ways to get LaTeX to do fancier things with page headings but I never bothered to learn how.

More details on how to nicely format your book interior to come. Stay tuned.

posted by Bhakta Jim on October, 19

RST Conversion Utilities

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 09:14:00 -0700

Once you have your RST file created you can convert it into other formats using two different utilities that can be installed for free on Windows, Mac, or Linux:

Docutils

Pandoc

Of the two, I prefer Docutils. I only use Pandoc to convert RST to plain text for Project Gutenberg, but it can also be used to create web pages, Tex documents, etc. just like docutils does. I suggest trying both to see which you prefer.

Converting an RST file to TEX is simple:

rst2latex book.rst > book.tex

To actually publish a book with LaTex you'll need to install the TeX document production system. This can also be downloaded and installed without cost for Windows. Mac and Linux.

Once you've done that you can run this command to generate a PDF from the TEX file converted from your RST file:

xelatex book.tex

The PDF generated is not quite what you'll need for a print-on-demand book interior. The page size will be wrong, it will lack front matter like a table of contents, etc. You'll need to hand edit the TEX file to convert it to the format you'll need. Fortunately that isn't too hard.

Stay tuned.

posted by Bhakta Jim on October, 19

So what is Restructured Text?

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 09:29:13 -0700

Restructured Text or RST is a way to describe the structure of a document simply that you can learn how to use in a few minutes. Once you have created an RST document you can run converters on it to create web pages, PDFs, EPUBs, and other more complex documents.

The desktop publishing system called LaTex (pronounced "lay-tek") can create beautifully formatted books, but it has a fairly steep learning curve. A good way to flatten that curve is to create your book text in RST, then run a conversion utility to make a TEX file out of it. Once you have that TEX file you can do a little tinkering on it to make a PDF that you can use for a print-on-demand book interior, without having to learn everything about TEX first.

I first learned about RST when I donated books to Project Gutenberg, a site where volunteers create free ebooks from books that have fallen into the public domain. PG requires donations be submitted in two formats:

1. A web page that follows certain rules.

2. A plain text page that follows certain rules.

You need to create both of these. One way you might do that is to create the plain text file first, make a copy of it, then go through the copy and add HTML tags for chapter headings, paragraphs, images, etc. That is what I used to do.

PG plain text files need to have a certain line length, need to represent bolded and italicized text a certain way, need to indicate where an illustration is in the original book text, and need to represent footnotes a certain way. Just creating the plain text file was a lot of work, then you needed to proofread it carefully before making the web page version so you didn't have to make the same corrections in two files.

Some people at PG got the idea that instead of creating two differently formatted files with the same text a volunteer might save a lot of work by making an RST file and using conversion utilities to generate the web page and the plain text file from that. It was a good idea, but it never caught on with PG volunteers. I was one of only a handful of people who tried it, which is unfortunate because the method saves a lot of work.

To give you an idea of just how simple the RST format it, here is a sample document in the format:

========
Book Title
========

Chapter Heading
--------------------

Section Heading
``````````````````

This is a paragraph with some *italicized text* and some **bold text**.

This paragraph has a footnote [#]_.

.. [#] This is the text of that footnote.

There is more you can do with RST, but that will give you an idea of how it works. Headings have a line of characters underneath them the same length as the heading.

The complete documentation for creating an RST file will be found here:

Details on how to convert your RST file to a finished book interior will follow. Stay tuned.

posted by Bhakta Jim on October, 18

Put old books back in print with Restructured Text!

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 09:30:00 -0700

We live in a world where no book ever has to go out of print, whether we realize it or not.

You may already know that is true for e-books, thanks to sites like archive.org and Project Gutenberg. But did you know it is true for printed books too? It is, thanks to print-on-demand services like Kindle Direct Publishing.

If you're a self-published author you may have tried this service and been unimpressed with the results. KDP does make it possible to make a printed book without knowing much about formatting interior pages or cover design, but the results don't look professional. That does NOT mean that professional results are not possible. They are possible, if you're willing to learn to use software which you can legally download for free.

I have used this software to bring old books back into print and sell them on Amazon. It doesn't bring in that much money, but it is a cheap and enjoyable hobby that can give forgotten books a whole new readership.

When I was in grade school I discovered the author Alfred Powell Morgan, who wrote books containing electronics projects for young readers. What I did not know at the time was that some of the books I read were actually written long before I was born and had been revised every few years to bring them up to date. The oldest versions of these books are in the public domain, meaning anyone who wants to reprint these books may legally do so.

I have done that with a few of them, and you can check out the results at Amazon:

The Boy Electrician: Practical Plans for Electrical Apparatus for work and play, with an explanation of the principles of every-day electricity.

If you do a "Look inside the book" you'll see that these books look quite professional, in every way comparable to the original printed editions. There is nothing about the appearance of these books that would tell you they were print-on-demand titles, but that is exactly what they are.

Are there any old books you'd like to put back in print? Stay tuned for details on a surprisingly simple way to do that.

posted by Bhakta Jim on October, 14

Something Unexpected From Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Thu, 17 May 2018 13:19:16 -0700

Mycroft Holmes by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is something unexpected, and not just because of its author. Many authors have written new stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. This is different. Sherlock only appears briefly in the story, and that appearance is before his career as the world's first consulting detective begins. This is Mycroft's story, not the Mycroft that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about, but the young man who would become that Mycroft.

This isn't really a Conan Doyle pastiche. The author doesn't attempt to use Doyle's style, just his characters. There is a lot of research in evidence here, most of it fascinating. If Conan Doyle had his hero take a boat from London to Trinidad we wouldn't have learned nearly as much about boat travel during that period as we do here, for example, but it doesn't hurt the story at all and it is interesting stuff.

The story is a good one, though not one that Conan Doyle would have written (in my opinion). There is a good mystery here, and the nefarious goings on that are uncovered are all too plausible.

If you only know Kareem Abdul-Jabbar from his basketball career or his hilarious role in the movie Airplane! give this book a chance.

Fans of Holmes will not be disappointed.

View all my reviews

posted by Bhakta Jim on February, 07