[434] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Programmers Needed!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael S. Hart)
Fri Jun 5 11:03:39 1992
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 1992 09:42:21 CDT
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L%UHUPVM1.BITNET@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU>
From: "Michael S. Hart" <HART@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list PACS-L <PACS-L%UHUPVM1.BITNET@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU>
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Project Gutenberg has been endeavoring for some time to bring various
versions of text readers to you, including programs which can be made
user specific to include/exclude various elements found in textfiles.
A specific example would be the ability for the user to select spaces
("whitespaces") the search portion of the program would ignore. . . .
In this manner, a user could search several versions of Shakespeare--
each with its own variants, and still find the desired quotation.
For example: if a person had the following variants:
1.) Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
2.) Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
3.) To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
and various mixtures of these. . .then a normal search program is
not going to find them all.
It would be nice if you could use the same program to search four
or five variant editions of a book to find the same quotations in
each of them, without having to worry whether the line is broken,
by the end of the line and carriage return and/or linefeed, or by
hypenation, either by the author or by a word-processing program,
or various other possible variations in the etexts.
We are hoping to find some programmers who can made these changes
in various Public Domain and Shareware programs, so users can use
their favorites without having to worry about missing quotations,
whether it be due to any of the above reasons, or ones we haven't
thought of yet.
The above example could easily be solved by allowing the users to
select commas and hyphens as "whitespaces" to be ignored by these
programs. Similar setup modifications could be used to make hits
occur when words are separated by other characters, invisible, or
visible, such as the carriage returns, linefeeds, end-of-file ^z,
etc.
Please let us know if you or someone you know could help!
=====================================================
Thank you for your interest,
Michael S. Hart, Professor of Electronic Text
Executive Director of Project Gutenberg Etext
Illinois Benedictine College, Lisle, IL 60532
No official connection to U of Illinois--UIUC
