Re^2: Perl Program Repair Shop and Red Flags book

And on kindles, the typography tends to be abysmal.

"@" for a or "&"; type sizes of examples unreadably-tiny (i.e., far worse than this) and effectively unchangeable; even missing pages (esp. errata).

Some of these problems occur with mainstream fiction, biography, etc., but it seems that whatever the process for conversion, it's badly flawed and perhaps, un-mastered by tech publishers.

Afterthought: did you subscribe to the "low volume" announcement list at the page you listed? (Links, here, BTW, need only a URL enclosed by square brackets; links with text which is different than the actual content take a pipe between URL and copy-to-be-rendered.)

Comment on Re^2: Perl Program Repair Shop and Red Flags book

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Re^3: Perl Program Repair Shop and Red Flags book by cavac (Prior) on Jul 02, 2012 at 14:41 UTC
I agree. Most normal books are fine, plus/minus the odd OCR problem for older books. Computer books are much harder to OCR, because spellchecking doesn't work. The only thing that can parse Perl is perl... I think my biggest disappointment for me was the Kindle version of Perl Best Practices. Perl::Critic depends heavily on page numbers which the Kindle version doesn't support. Otherwise this would be a very good, portable reference (the printed PBP is quite heavy, and mine is starting to loose pages because of constant going back-and-forth through the pages). If Damian is reading this: I would pay good money for a PerlModule version of the book i can just plugin to P::C that shows me the POD version of the full text for any guideline that just popped up in testing. Sorry for any bad spelling, broken formatting and missing code examples. I broke my left hand and i'm doing the best i can here...	[reply]
Re^4: Perl Program Repair Shop and Red Flags book by ww (Archbishop) on Jul 02, 2012 at 17:25 UTC
I'm with you on the lack of page numbers... and that would be incredibly easy to fix... insert the page numbers in the actual text body, rather than splicing them in as headers or footers. OTOH, if e-publishers are OCRing hard copy to create [ kindle \| nook \| pdf ] versions, they're more hidebound (or living further in the past) than I credit. Talk about do something the hard way! Modern publishing almost certainly uses a digital version at some point in the process... the author's output; that of a minion who digitized hardcopy and proofed it; a press-(almost)-ready generation, which is to say, 'ready for whatever electronic version of typesetting is in use'... with markup complete. /me cannot conceive a reason for bypassing those, in order to OCR a book. And even if one imagines a publisher so far sunk in the 'old ways' as to be using linotype technololgy or (heaven forefend) moveable type, somebody's proofing the imprint before it goes to mass production. Of course, in that last case, someone would have to proof the OCRed version -- before and after [ kindle-ization \| nook-i-fication \| whatever ] -- ...which ain't all that damned expensive, given that the typical price of an epub version closely approximates that of buying the text on dead trees! oh, was i ranting? sorry.	[reply]