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Parallel texts project | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5436 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes  Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 17 of 103 27 March 2010 at 4:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'd say go ahead with your project but it would be good to offer RTF like on gutenberg.org. As I said, PDF is not the best for anything but printing. My idea is only vapourware at the moment. There might be an easy way to parse RTF, so I could use this input later on. PDF cannot be parsed with good results. If you encourage the use of MS Word there might sooner or later be docx files around, and I'm not so sure whether other programs can handle that.
If I should ever get somewhere with my idea it will probably be constrained to a simple script. You wouldn't have to edit HTML, LaTeX or know what epub is (it's a format used by ebook to circumvent the problems with PDF) but plain text input files that may require some additional tags like in "Bla bla bla. #join# Bla bla bla!" in order to join two sentences to the same table cell when in the other language there is only one sentence. If for some reason it doesn't work as expected you would be screwed if you don't know how to program and to change the script. Writing a stable version, maybe with a graphical interface, is a lot of work, and I don't have the time to do that. So one day or another I may upload some bilingual books somewhere that I created myself and that's it. I could give the script away if someone is interested, but this is not solution for everyone. If you could offer a format like RTF or the OpenOffice format .odt I may be able to create different file types from that directly if Word cannot do it and feed them back to your site. Edited by OlafP on 27 March 2010 at 4:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MarcoDiAngelo Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 6448 days ago 208 posts - 345 votes Speaks: Serbian*, English, Spanish, Russian Studies: Thai, Polish | Message 18 of 103 27 March 2010 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Can you open .rtf at the moment? Isn't it a Microsoft-created format too? What is the difference between it and .doc?
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| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6784 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 19 of 103 27 March 2010 at 4:45pm | IP Logged | ||
.rtf is by a big margin a simple format, and an older format (that doesn't keep changing with every version of Word), so it's much easier to support. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5436 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 20 of 103 27 March 2010 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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MS have published the specification of RTF, so there are libraries around that can handle it. With DOC they keep changing the format, at least they did it several times in the past, and the specs are kept secret. So any changes in the format must be figured out by reverse-engineering the files created by Word. This takes time and the people who do it might not detect all the quirks, so you can never be sure that all DOC files can be opened by other programs.
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| MarcoDiAngelo Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 6448 days ago 208 posts - 345 votes Speaks: Serbian*, English, Spanish, Russian Studies: Thai, Polish | Message 21 of 103 27 March 2010 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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So you say I should change doc format into rtf and that would suit you? Sounds reasonable, no problem.
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| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5436 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 22 of 103 27 March 2010 at 5:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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RTF would be fine, ODT (the OpenOffice format) would be perfect.
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| MarcoDiAngelo Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 6448 days ago 208 posts - 345 votes Speaks: Serbian*, English, Spanish, Russian Studies: Thai, Polish | Message 23 of 103 27 March 2010 at 5:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Microsoft Word cannot open .odt, that's the catch. I just tried. Many people would have to download and install Open Office just to be able to read the books. Open Office, on the other hand reads .rtf. And it's much easier for me to convert the files into .rtf - I don't even know how to make them odt.
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| dolly Senior Member United States Joined 5791 days ago 191 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin | Message 24 of 103 27 March 2010 at 6:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would just like to say that in the ebook world, whether we're talking about public domain sites or file-sharing, PDFs are everywhere (often compressed as rar files). You might see other options for a given text, like mobi, doc or epub, but if the text is in only one format it's probably PDF. Easily, over 90% of all ebooks. PDF is popular because it works as an ebook format--I've converted and read dozens of books this way on my kindle. The question is how to make double-column, parallel language texts (in any format) work on an ereader. Because most people would rather read on their device instead of on their computer. Edited by dolly on 27 March 2010 at 6:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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