EVOLUTION OF MASTER SOURCE FORMATS

Plain text was the first master source type/format for Project

Gutenberg, and remains important today. Plain text is readable on any

device. Plain text is printable, and efficient to store (including

for compression, or sharing by email). For decades, the International

Standards Organization has provided standard computerized encoding for

the basic American standard codes (ASCII) and extensions for accents

and other special characters (Latin1 or ISO 8859-1). Encoding exists for

other languages, and Unicode (with 8- and 16-bit variations) provides

encoding for larger groups of characters.

Within the first few hundred Project Gutenberg eBooks, some encoding was

offered which seemed promising, but did not withstand the test of time.

An early PostScript file was rendered unusable due to insertion of the

Project Gutenberg standard header; a dictionary included markup that,

today, might be reminiscent of XML or ReStructured Text, but without any

sort of codebook for proper presentation; a few word processor native

formats, including WordStar and WordPerfect, were used but are no longer

readable with modern computers.

Even HTML (and other XML variants) was viewed with skepticism, since the

longevity of formats is notoriously difficult to predict when they first

become available.

For these reasons, Project Gutenberg still prefers to make plain text

available for essentially every eBook. The only exceptions are those

for which no plain text encoding is reasonable — such as Chinese, or

mathematical texts, or music. In this way, the collection is “future

proof,” so that even if all content cannot be fully represented as text,

the files themselves will still be readable and enjoyable to read.

Figure 3: Typical text view, showing fixed-length lines and spacing

among components.

Forty-Five Years of Digitizing Ebooks: Project Gutenberg's Practices · 第 21 / 30 题