Hello!

No repository to actually *patch*, but here is a public domain book!

It's the classic: _The Importance of Being Earnest_.

I saved the plain text file from Project Gutenberg with a .gmi
extension.

Enjoy!

It would probably be helpful to invest a little bit more effort into
each book reformatting it for Gemtext, for example reflowing the text
and setting up headings for chapters.

On Tue Oct 27, 2020 at 4:10 PM UTC, Drew DeVault wrote:
> It would probably be helpful to invest a little bit more effort into
> each book reformatting it for Gemtext, for example reflowing the text
> and setting up headings for chapters.

I've done that and more here, aligning the lines and just making it look
neater.  However, I've not stripped the Project Gutenburg stuff around
the main text - I don't know how we want to deal with it?  I think the
Project Gutenburg license allows us to just remove it completely, but I
wanted to check beforehand about what to do with it.

Also, what's the plan with cataloging, if any?  I suppose we would
tag the books by type, genre, etc.  That would require providing
metadata, so we'll need to create a format and then a parser and
catalog(u?)er for it.

>It would probably be helpful to invest a little bit more effort into
>each book reformatting it for Gemtext, for example reflowing the text
>and setting up headings for chapters.

Yes, I agree. Also, considering how long some of these texts will be, is
it worth breaking up chapters into individual pages? Especially since
there is no way (as far as I know) to link to headings in Gemini, it
might be a little unwieldy scrolling through a massive wall of text to
find your place.

>However, I've not stripped the Project Gutenburg stuff around
>the main text - I don't know how we want to deal with it?  I think the
>Project Gutenburg license allows us to just remove it completely, but I
>wanted to check beforehand about what to do with it.

I'll look into this as well, but I belive the PG preamble can be
removed, but somewhere the license must be referenced still. 

>Also, what's the plan with cataloging, if any?  I suppose we would
>tag the books by type, genre, etc.  That would require providing
>metadata, so we'll need to create a format and then a parser and
>catalog(u?)er for it.

This seems to be probably the most important consideration to make
before accumulating and formating a mass of texts. Would it suffice to
include some YAML front matter in the source files, and just 'build' the
library in the typical static-site-generator way? Or would it be
necessary to maintain a database for all that metadata?

Would a static-generation method become unwieldy? It doesn't seem like
it would, (but I'm also speaking from a relative lack of experience) 
and the entire library wouldn't need to be rebuilt every time, of 
course. Might be worth starting a new thread to discuss this further~

On Wed Oct 28, 2020 at 4:26 AM UTC, mieum wrote:
> This seems to be probably the most important consideration to make
> before accumulating and formating a mass of texts. Would it suffice to
> include some YAML front matter in the source files, and just 'build'
> the library in the typical static-site-generator way? Or would it be
> necessary to maintain a database for all that metadata?
>
> Would a static-generation method become unwieldy? It doesn't seem like
> it would, (but I'm also speaking from a relative lack of experience)
> and the entire library wouldn't need to be rebuilt every time, of
> course.

I think we can set up a sr.ht CI service to scan changed text
frontmatter (including frontmatter for new texts) and then to send that
to the main booksin.space server database (which can then update
relevant pages).  That would combine both worlds pretty neatly, but I
don't know if there are any security implications to consider.  Also,
the CI would have to be disabled/changed for mailing list submissions,
so that no one can affect the server by posting patches on the mailing
list.

> Might be worth starting a new thread to discuss this further~

Not a bad idea.

P.S: I don't know if it showed up, but I had attached my updates to
Nathan's text in my previous message.