[Sugar-devel] Fwd: Testing the production & use of ebooks

[James Simmons]

I meant to copy the lists on my response to Samy:


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: James Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, May 30, 2010 at 8:42 PM
Subject: Re: Testing the production & use of ebooks
To: samy boutayeb <s.boutayeb at free.fr>


Samy,

Thanks for your detailed feedback.  I'm afraid you're evaluating a
book that is still being written.  I work on it every day, and I learn
new things myself every day.

There is a lot of material in the book that has not been published yet
(in the FLOSS Manuals sense.  The material is there, but you need to
look at it page by page, not through the "website" link.

I can't account for test #5.  My experience with DjVu has been
positive so far.  What I can tell you is that there is a Git
repository for the scripts in the book:

http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/e-book-making-scripts

If you can tell me exactly what steps you did I can try to see what
went wrong.  Maybe you could send the images in question?

I can explain why Read Etexts will not read your PDFs.  It isn't meant
to.  It only works with Plain Text files such as those from Project
Gutenberg, plus it can convert an RTF file from Baen Free Library into
Plain Text.  Only the Read Activity can read PDFs and DjVus.

It doesn't sound like you've tried Scan Tailor yet.  I strongly
recommend that you do, at least for books that are mostly text.

Also, I'm working on chapters for Plain Text and EPUB.  I have put the
Boy's Aviation book through OCR and I'm correcting it by hand.

You should not consider my book the work of a subject matter expert.
(I'm not an expert in writing Sugar Activities either.  I just thought
we needed a book so I decided to try and write one).  I'm on the same
journey you are on.

There's going to be a mentoring program for students in Oregon this
summer and they will also be creating e-books using my instructions
and hopefully making contributions to the book too.  By the end of the
summer it could be a really good book.  Right now, it's getting there.

Thanks again for your feedback, and good luck!

James Simmons


On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 12:40 PM, samy boutayeb <s.boutayeb at free.fr> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> OLPC France's folks are trying to produce real-world ebooks with the
> partnership of a malagasian publisher, in order to give them to our
> deployments in Madagascar.
>
> So, we are testing the production & the use of those documents, based on
> James Simmons book "The Readers are the
> Leaders" ( http://en.flossmanuals.net/ReadingandSugar/Introduction ),
> and using as source file 2 jpeg files with mixed text & color images
>
> Our observations are:
>
> 1/ jpeg > pdf (1 page):
> production: open jpeg with gimp + print it to pdf
> reading: with Read: ok
> 2/ jpeg > pdf (multipage pdf):
> production: convert *.jpg test_ebook.pdf
> reading: with Read: ok (without rotation)
> 3/ pdf > djvu (2 pages)
> production: pdf2djvu -o test2.djvu test_ebook.pdf
> reading: on a xo with Read: ok
> 4/ jpeg > djvu (1 page)
> production: c44 "livre1 page3.jpg" (one page by page)
> reading: DjView3 on a linux pc: ok
> reading: on a xo with Read: ok (without rotation)
> 5/ jpeg > djvu (2 pages in batch)
> using the script mkdjvus.py from (
> http://en.flossmanuals.net/ReadingandSugar/MakingDjVus )
> résult: ugly: 1 b/w page, with the 2 source page overimposed, and resulting in a unreadable page
>
> 3 additional observations:
> - The reading from Read in Mirabelle (Soas3) doesnt work (the error message says "Failed to start").
> - The rotation doesnt work on the XO 1.5
> - The Read Etexts activity doesnt see/open the pdf/djvu file
>
> FWIW, regards,
>
> Samy
>
>