User:Rossolson
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Where I first heard about PG
I recall reading about the PG project in the late '80s or early '90s while using BBSs in my local area. It was a truly mind-opening moment as I saw that someone was really trying to bring the mythical digital library to life, and that it wasn't some corporation, some government entity, or a stuffy, gatekeeping, professionals-only, industry group. It was just a guy, casually changing the world for the better. Thank you Mr. Michael Hart.
→ To memorize: https://www.pgdp.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=61857&hilit=Gutenberg.net#p61857
Questions
- Why are all PG links from GoodReads are broken?
- Fix on GR side, via support request - ongoing as of October 2025
- Fix on PG side via URL Rewrite - testing URL rewrite on dev site. High ASCII characters might cause problems.
- What is up with this old site?
- projectgutenbergproject.blogspot.com - a Book review site with multiple contributors. This seems to have faded away.
- Support and revive?
- Why is there no meta viewport tag set on most HTML ebooks?
- This was due to a confluence of effort required, misunderstanding of actions and reasons, and miscommunication.
- Work is now in progress to fix, both automated and manual.
- Will benefit from having a manual review process. Perhaps help from Gutvols list?
- How to best handle Math books?
- How to prune and reduce the use of "Various" and "Other" and "Miscellaneous" as types / kinds / categories?
- Can the Encyclopedia Britannica books be moved to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. Creator, like the EB Reader's Guide?
- Suggest revisions to the description or readme info about the PG Encyclopedia work that explains the reason it exists, how it was resolved into the EB works, what will happen to the reserved ebook numbers, etc.
- May ask for help in other circumstances as needs arise.
- Can search results display the Kind (specifically Audio) in the returned title? This would be similar to how "(French)" or "(Italian)" is included in some titles.
- Can Audiobooks that are performances vs text to-speech generated be noted somewhere in either description and/or the suffixed name (Audiobook, performance) vs (Audiobook, generated)?
- Maybe cover images could highlight the content type, without bothering the catalog content.
- https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9145 has "speaker" icons next to the Readme and Index text files. Fixable?
- eBooks in the category of Sound would benefit from transcriptions. Example
- Are "years" in the database stored as "integer", instead of "date"?
- Kindle limitations by generation?
- Interesting Note
- Updated text for eReader help page in progress.
- Why is PG previous logo and identity?
- https://web.archive.org/web/20101221093449im_/http://www.idpf.org/EPUBlogo/epub_logo_color.jpg
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Project_Gutenberg_logo.svg
- Find and remove, as this white on red logo with 90° angles is too reminiscent of other "logos"
- Consider/propose new options?
- Could https://readk.it/ be useful? A "mygutenberg.org" library collection?
- Can the RSS feed and Mastodon feed of new books include the full text from the posts to the posted mailing list?
Answered
- Why the lowercase on "The call of the wild"? Are these titles generated through book/file-based metadata or are they maintained separately in the database?
- ✅ This is intended but not propagated to the rest of the site. (It looks very odd to me, but it is in the style of LoC naming.)
- What happened to gutenberg.net?
- ✅ Its registration expired in 2020, was scooped up by other parties.
- What is up with this old site? ✅ gutenbergnews.org - Made contact with Michael Cook, the operator. He is working on updating the archive to the latest newsletters via GitHub.
- Is RST truly dead? Why?
- ✅ Lack of interest in maintaining, HTML is sufficient.
- Should m.gutenberg.org just redirect to gutenberg.org?
- ✅ Done.
Should search results show total found alongside the pagination?- ❌ Rejected due to processing overhead.
- Does gut-vols still have a purpose?
- ✅ In progress. Using for research help.
Interesting External Links
Personal To Do List
Conversion of MFTPM (ongoing)
- Standardize Math books at PG w/o LaTeX
- Notes on Math Content Authoring for PG
- Discussion on pgdp.net forum
- Wrapping m2svg to support an HTML file.
- Flattened/pre-rendering of the MathJAX
- Manual Process ✅
- Command line process ☑️
- Derive from a single source file
- HTML ✅
- LaTeX (& PDF) ✅
- Plain text ☑️
- Images replaced with SVG ✅
- Generate log/sine/cosine/tangent lookup tables from calculations ✅
- In progress files available ✅
- rossolson.com/pgdp/mftpm/
- Just pick a day and submit it: https://upload.pglaf.org/
- Prep for other "for the Practical Man" books, after copyright clearance.
Contribute book covers
Targets:
- Top Downloaded
- First 100 books
- First 100 authors - top 10's
- US government/history books
- Shakespeare
Examples:
- https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/84
- https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15
- https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1080 (Template that included from rare – well done background colors rejected.)
- https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1 - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9
- https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/8
- https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67979
Preference for covers in descending order: Original 1st edition covers. Original 1st printing dust jackets. Title page. Use 'stripes' template with a low res/older title inset. US Flag background with department seal/historical image.
Contribute to social media team
- Team: mailing list
- Reddit: r/projectgutenberg
- gutvols-d: mailing list
Contribute to site code base
- Proofing and QA for static pages
- Offer incremental design revisions
- Propose clean up/migration/modernizations
- Propose code based on Clean Code principles
- Assist with https://github.com/gutenbergtools/website_update/issues/1
- Propose pagination code and pre-rendering for certain listings
- Move pagination HTML outside of the results columns.
- Author-specific landing pages
- Search and all other pages use query strings as much as possible.
- ❌ Push back due to aggressive bots.
- Search results page to include search form with current target string pre-filled.
- Improve layout/usability of https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top
- Replace icons with Unicode emojis where possible.
- Reduce impact of mini-reset css in nav bar. - gutenberg/new_nav.css
- Progressive Enhancement techniques for all client side code
- https://blogs.sitepointstatic.com/examples/tech/pe/pe-html-css-js.html can be used for the tabs in Advanced Search.
- The top nav bar does not need to be pinned to the top of the viewport ✅
- Understand the network, hosting, domain reg, certs of PG.
- Improve auto linking of URLs in bibrec pages. ✅
- Unusual to have protocol not linked.
- Trailing punctuation is getting caught in regex.
- Some URLs simply need to be fixed.
Contribute to curation efforts
- Support conversion of works that were submitted/published in non-HTML source files
- RTF files RTF Recapture Project
- Plain text versions that have poor HTML conversions 79 80
- Suggested improvements to MovingImage, StillImage, Dataset types as identified
- StillImage -
- MovingImage -
- Dataset - (88 works)
- Collection - Propose alternative and additional entries
- LaTeX to HTML pipelines
- Audio recordings should have transcripts!
- added to README?
- New separate HTML?
- Likely to find external sources.
- Propose mechanism/policies/procedures to handle multiple version entries
- Next/Previous in series references
- Use of Collection types
- Update descriptions to note reason for entry, unique aspect, allowing for comparison of works without manual evaluation by readers.
- Make existing Audio books more distinct in title-level naming
- Potentially using Collections mechanism
- Improve Calibre's listings
- Problems with covers
- Missing: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agutenberg.org+%22No+cover+available%22
- Malformed / Incorrect size. High profile/low book number Shakespeare works have inappropriate images set as "covers". ✅
- Improve the cover generator
- Problematic entries: 900, 1070–1073
Create SVG of PG logo
Books to read
- https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/75807/pg75807-images.html
- https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/75893/pg75893-images.html
- https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/75948/pg75948-images.html
Books to Contribute
- Arithmetic for the Practical Man
- Algebra for the Practical Man
- Geometry for the Practical Man
- Trigonometry for the Practical Man
- Calculus for the Practical Man
- Works by The Associated Publishers and Dr. Carter G. Woodson.
- Items from the readingroo.ms
eBooks to Write
- Compilations of PG newsletters
- Compilation of MSH materials
- PG History Updates, 1
- Local copies of Vaknin interviews (backup from Tripod domain hosting) 1 2 3
- https://preprints.readingroo.ms/ !!!