[Indic-computing-users] Re: [Ankur-archive] Re: [bytesforall_readers] An Indian chapter for Project Gutenberg?

[Deepayan S. <dee...@st...>]

On Tuesday 02 September 2003 03:00 am, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
> > On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, Michael Hart wrote:
> >> We would LOVE to include an Indian chapter of Project Guteberg!!!
> >
> > What needs to be done to take this forward? Could someone help with the
> > technology and website etc? Maybe we could look around for volunteers
> > willing to work on getting the e-texts readied, or seek permission from
> > those publishers willing to share their current texts.
> >
> > Permit me to copy this to two networks -- BytesForAll, which has people
> > interested in making computing relevant to the commonman (what better
> > way than spreading e-books!) and IndicComputing, a networking working to
> > get Indian language computing going in this part of the globe. Once we
> > get that critical piece of the jigsaw in place, it could open up lots of
> > possibilities. Including for Project Gutenberg (http://gutenberg.net). FN
>
> Hi,
> I would just like to mention here - that there a subproject of the Ankur
> Bangla Project (www.ankurbangla.org) which deals with archival of Bengali
> literary work. The page of the subproject is at
> http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~deepayan/Bengali/WebPage/bengali.html

Which should eventually be superceded by what's now at 

http://franz.stat.wisc.edu/~deepayan/Bengali/

I have had some exchanges with Greg Newby about getting some of this stuff 
into PG. See, for example, 

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=2877462&forum_id=15580

I haven't been able to follow up on this (yet) due to lack of time. I would 
definitely appreciate any help, especially with scans of title pages etc that 
would prove public-domain-ness of pieces that are already in the archive. 
(Indian publishers are not very careful with that sort of stuff, so the info 
is often just missing. Not being in India right now, it's difficult for me to 
look around for different editions.)

The format is definitely an issue to worry about. I think everyone would agree 
on Unicode (UTF-8) being the preferred representation. I was thinking of HTML 
with some default fonts specified in the stylesheet, and some simple 
javascript text fields to dynamically customize fonts. Any alternative 
suggestions are most welcome.

Deepayan