Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Subject: Re: The brick and mortar
From: "mieum" <mieum@namu.blue>
To: "Arav K." <nothien@uber.space>, "Callum Brown" <callum@calcuode.com>,
 <~mieum/booksin.space@lists.sr.ht>
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2020 18:15:40 +0900
Message-Id: <C6Q41AD9KBSV.39QOYOWCLFX68@maclibre>
In-Reply-To: <C6Q38D0C6NVK.GE6OFX73DOKR@gux>

>the centralized repo should also be made available, perhaps at a
>different subdomain (e.g. 'repo.booksin.space' or 'content.<...>' etc.),
>so that others can freely keep copies of the same main content.

I agree :) It's there, might as well make it accessible~ Also, on a
somehwat related note, it may be good to write the builder so that it is
portable to other domains. That is, it might be nice to make it so that
this repo could be cloned, built, and hosted on another domain if
desirable~ It's not "essential," but relatively easy to implement, so
why not?

>Even if individual .gmi files for chapters are
>provided, I would also like a singular .gmi file containing the entire
>text, for completeness.  As such, it may be best to require a singular
>complete .gmi, but also allow for splitting the text into multiple .gmi
>files which would automagically (or manually) be linked to in a
>table-of-contents page.

This is pretty much what I mean. There should be a complete text
available, but also it would be nice if the table of contents was a list
of links that linked to separate .gmi files for each chapter (because
some texts will be quite long and unwiedly otherwise...although, if your
client has a search function then it is kind of irrelevant :b). It may
be worth putting this off until later. It wouldn't be too hard to add
this "feature" later on if it seems like a good idea.

>Unless too many complications arise, the main build system could simply
>be a Makefile, which could refer to more complex commands (in C, Python,
>whatever) to do stuff like index generation.

For sure. I have only limited programming skills to contribute, but I
could collaborate on something in Python. I do not know C, but if that's
the direction things take then I guess I will be learning (I had wanted
to anyway. This whole project is a learning experience for me anyway,
like everything!)

>I think, because the files may contain somewhat repetitive content (due
>to having translations of the main text), the metadata should be a
>separate .yml / .bib file (or both .yml and .bib).  That may also be
>slightly easier to parse (as you don't need to find the metadata
>embedded inside a file, and there is a singular location for the
>metadata).

These are good points. I had not considered just sourcing metadata from
a .bib file. That might be a better option, actually. Speaking of .bib
files, it might be nice to have a central .bib file that includes all
the info for the whole library. That would be useful for writing scripts
to GET all the books from one author, for example.

Also I meant to respond to your comment about page numbers. Unless the
source contains them, that may be difficult to include. I'm always happy
to find ebooks that have "real" page numbers because it makes citing
them in papers easier. As far as denoting them in the text, there are
several ways. One would simply be to add something like [pg 43] in-line
with the text. But this is hard to notice. Another option would be to
break a paragraph with a single pre-formatted line that states the
"real" page number. But keep in mind, the goal of this library is not
necessarily to provide exact replications of the originals. Indeed,
whatever we get from project gutenberg, for example, is already an
abstraction or derivation of an original source. But like you said,
where page numbers are an integral part of the text, that is, where they
are needed to make sense of the content, then whoever prepares that text
would need to decided on an appropriate way to indicate them.

Thanks Arav! Also, I saw that you contacted me on irc, and I pinged you
back.

~mieum