The Hugo Book

Jon Fry · Post by **Jon Fry** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 10:05 am

I've been thinking about ordering the softcover of this. Can someone give me an idea of the book's size (physical dimensions, that is, not page count)? Is the binding good? Does it lay flat?

I know these sound like petty concerns, but what the hey. They matter to me.

Jon

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 11:06 am

Yeah, offhand I can't tell you because I have not purchased it myself. That needs to change. I have all the books for every programming language I've ever pretended to know on my desk but not the one where I am a certified expert (or at least I would be if such certification were available).

Hey, maybe I can whip up something in Microsoft Certificate Maker and send it to Kent and he can sign it.

Or maybe I could use "Print Shop."

Or maybe a "text file."

Or maybe an awkwardly drawn letter saying "EXPERT" in Logo with the turtle still visible on the screen.

pinback · Post by **pinback** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 11:08 am

Draw it in 6809.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 11:20 am

pinback wrote:Draw it in 6809.

Is it the octopus with the cream sauce today or the cream sauce with the octopus?

pinback · Post by **pinback** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 11:31 am

I don't understand what that means, and I doubt that I am alone.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 11:56 am

pinback wrote:I don't understand what that means, and I doubt that I am alone.

My favorite "should-be" awkward moment for the Phoenix Palm is when the owner mixes up the pictures intended for the new menu with his private collection of crime scene photographs. I'd like a #1, please. The Triple Homicide? With an extra helping of torn uterus on the side? Yes, please!

pinback · Post by **pinback** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 12:10 pm

Everything alright there, Jones?

Merk · Post by **Merk** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 1:05 pm

It's a regular-sized computer reference book. Basically, it's the same size as the O'Rielly "animal" books (I.e., the "camel" book for Perl, etc). I can measure mine when I get home, if that's still unclear. :)

The binding seems fine. It's profesionally done. I'm glad I bought it. It's the *exact* same thing as the Hugo Book that you can download in PDF format for free (at least, I assume you still can) -- which is an improvement over the original Hugo reference (but with much the same content). I like being able to flip through the pages while my game code is on-screen. I prefer printed references anyway. :)

My only complaint is with the index. It's good for the most part, but there have been times where either what I wanted to look up didn't appear in the index, or it appeared with so many page references as to be confusing. I wish I could think of some examples. But for the most part, the index works fine. :)

Lysander · Post by **Lysander** » Sat Aug 06, 2005 10:19 pm

While I'm on the subject, is there any possibility of the book being released in .chm or .html or, hey, just plain .txt format?

PDF hurts my nonexistent eyes. Thank you, that is all.

Lysander · Post by **Lysander** » Sat Aug 06, 2005 10:19 pm

...WHOOPS.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sun Aug 07, 2005 11:42 am

Lysander wrote:While I'm on the subject, is there any possibility of hte book being released in .chm or .html or, hey, just plain .txt format?

PDF hurts my nonexistent eyes. Thank you, that is all.

Do you have the older version of it? Do you have it and just want the new version in non-PDF and therefore readable manner?

PDFs really can't ever be used in speech synthesis software? What a failing of the specification!

Kent · Post by **Kent** » Sun Aug 07, 2005 1:08 pm

You know, I thought at one time there had been an HTML version produced from the .doc or .rtf manual, but now I'm not sure where it is. If I get a chance I'll look into what sort of shape the RTF-to-HTML converters and that sort of thing are in these days.

Merk · Post by **Merk** » Sun Aug 07, 2005 2:04 pm

Microsoft Word should be able to convert pretty well, just by saving as HTML.

Lysander · Post by **Lysander** » Sun Aug 07, 2005 3:41 pm

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Do you have the older version of it?

No.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Do you have it and just want the new version in non-PDF and therefore readable manner?

Yes.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:PDFs really can't ever be used in speech synthesis software? What a failing of the specification!

You're telling me.

Well, technically, PDF can be used with screen readers. But it's a half-assed sourt of support. It's kind of like how I-Tunes works in Windows. You can read it, but its' very annoying and you have to read it page-by-page and if collumns are introduced it gets confused easily. I exported it as a text file, but that's little better really; thigns get kind of... jumbled. And it doesn't feel like I'm reading it the way it's supposed to be read. Which is, you know, bad. And things.

Kent · Post by **Kent** » Sun Aug 07, 2005 5:57 pm

Merk wrote:Microsoft Word should be able to convert pretty well, just by saving as HTML.

The only problem with that is it ends up as a single gigantic HTML file, which isn't ideal. I could do that (for Lysander) in the interim, but there are tools that will generate HTML pages based on styles and headings, which would be closer to ideal.

Lysander · Post by **Lysander** » Sun Aug 07, 2005 7:28 pm

Kent wrote:You know, I thought at one time there had been an HTML version produced from the .doc or .rtf manual, but now I'm not sure where it is. If I get a chance I'll look into what sort of shape the RTF-to-HTML converters and that sort of thing are in these days.

Whoa, wait, wait a minute...

There's a .rtf or .doc version of the hugo book in the first place? 'Cause, like... I never saw that anywhere. Just the pdf. .doc and .rtf is less than ideal because I have this horrible, horrible prejudice of Microsoft Word (which is, granted, just my problem) but I'm, you know, willing to deal with that. It's better than freakign PDF... Anyway, I just thought it was neat that the inform manual got converted into .chm, so it was like an actual help file for a program with a treeview of topics to select from and whatnot. </pointless aside>

Kent · Post by **Kent** » Thu Aug 11, 2005 4:58 am

The original manuscript is in a Word document, yeah. But it's not publicly available as such. Maybe we could work something out.

What's best? A Word document, a giant single HTML file on one page, or...something else I'm not thinking of.

.Chm...hmm. I hadn't really thought of a help file version in a long time. I'll look into that, too.

Sandsquish · Post by **Sandsquish** » Thu Aug 11, 2005 7:16 am

Kent wrote:What's best? A Word document, a giant single HTML file on one page, or...something else I'm not thinking of.

Can users contribute different file formattings of the manual to the Archive?

If we could, that might save you some time.

(By the way, how do you convert from PDF to anything else? I might be able to get PostScript from it, but that's about it.)

Hugella · Post by **Hugella** » Thu Aug 11, 2005 3:07 pm

I don't know how relevant this is, but the Hugomicon's got the 2.4 and 2.5 manuals in a couple of different formats, including Treepad (whatever that is) and .rtf.

For a web-based format, I'm thinking that a wiki might work well. It would allow people to add expanded explanations, make corrections, etc.

Lysander · Post by **Lysander** » Sun Aug 14, 2005 4:46 pm

.doc'd probably be best, as for some reason my laptop has just decided to crash the Dell Support program, Gmail, Windows Update, (randomly) Outlook Express, (even more randomly) just hitting the back button, and the windows help module.

Hugella wrote:For a web-based format, I'm thinking that a wiki might work well. It would allow people to add expanded explanations, make corrections, etc.

H--hey, there's a thought. I hadn't even considered that. I think that's really, really sharp. I could see that working really well, actually.