[IAEP] The Children's Library On OLPC project

[Jim Simmons]

Albert,

I don't disagree with much that you have said here.  The reason I
supported zipped text files to begin with was because that's one of
the formats Project Gutenberg provides.  As for PDFs, an enormous
number of PDF's are available from the Internet Archive and every one
of them is produced by scanning full book pages whether they include
illustrations or not.  Now this may not be the best way to create a
PDF, and in fact is probably as bad as you can get.  But it is a
*large* source of really valuable content.  And you can't store many
books in that format on an XO.  You *can* store as many as a child is
likely to want to keep on there if the child chooses the books
himself.

In any case, whether you store a compressed book or the original file
the Journal is a perfectly adequate place to put it.

James Simmons

On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 3:37 AM, Albert Cahalan<acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This encapsulation makes it more difficult for people to share
> books with non-Sugar users. If a Sugar user provides a PDF to a
> Windows user, Adobe Acrobat should recognize it. Likewise for
> sharing with MacOS X and GNOME users.
>
> Putting a bit of non-critical metadata on a file is not a reason
> to be changing the file format. Normally an xattr would be used to
> store this data. (hopefully the Journal is xattr compatible)
>
>> The XO does not have enough disk space to hold hundreds of books as
>> PDFs.  Plain text files would work, but kids like pictures and I don't
>> blame them.  As I see it, the child should choose what books go on his
>> computer for himself, and delete books when he has lost interest in
>> them.
>
> This all depends greatly on the PDF generation tool.
> Most are not focused on producing small files.
>
> Text should be stored as text. It should not have fancy kerning,
> because this causes bloat from constantly specifying coordinates.
> It should use a standard PDF font. The font should not be embedded.
>
> The PDF should be compressed. (not just the images)
>
> Images should be stored as JPEG with an appropriate compression
> level. Computer-generated line art should be in vector format.
>
> A recent PDF standard revision should be used.
>