Re: Still interested in the daisyplayer project?
On 08/03/2008, Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com> wrote:
> It is definitely easier to handle for packaging. Note that you have
> commited one generated file (src/snprintf/Makefile), and some cache
> files (autom4te.cache/*), as well as some symlinks that should be
> replaced with real files.
This slipup should be cleaned up now.
> I tried to play
> <URL:ftp://linux-speakup.org/pub/linux/goodies/daisy-books/ToLove.tar.bz2>,
> only to discover that libdaisy only handle XML files, and not the HTML
> files included in ToLove.tar.bz2. Is this intentional? I managed to
> get the player limping along with this book after editing the .html
> and .htm files to make their format more close to valid XML.
I haven't really been very much involved in the XML parsing bit of
libdaisy. I'll have to spend some time and look at how the parsing is
done. As I understood the ones who did the parsers, daisy books are
much like webpages - very few follow the standards. Unfortunately (I
think) the parsers might be a bit fragile if a book break the standard.
Some brainstorming regarding parsing and future development (I havent
thought out anything in any detail yet, but someone might find them
interesting):
For future development, it could be interesting to see if we can use
(for example) tidylib to verify books and improve our parsing. We
might be able to fix some common errors or get informative error
messages.
We might also be able to replace much of the parsing with some sort of
XML transformation to an 'internal' format. If I'm not mistaken, they
are working on yet another Daisy standard now. I suspect it's easier
to maintain a set of XSLT-files rather than individual programmed
parsers.
This should also lead to interesting possibilities when it comes to
ODF / OOXML. There's already an OOXML->Daisy converter that I suspect
use XSLT. Apparently, this enables MS Office-users to save documents
as Daisy-books.
In theory, we migt be able to do one better. If we do the
transformation in libdaisy we might be able to play (properly
formatted) ODF (and OOXML?)-documents directly and use something like
festival og espeak for audio output.
But, I'm a noob at linux application development and this is too
ambitious for me alone. This will require someone who know what
they're doing to get involved. :)
--
mvh.
André Lindhjem
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