Project description (max 200 words): The book “TZM Defined” is still one of the best materials out there to get familiar with the Zeitgeist train of thought. But many URLs are out of date. And it could certainly use an ePUB version to be better readable on phones. ePUB also allows text to speech, turning the book into a poor man’s audio book I will ask Peter if he still has the source material available. Maybe we can simply update the URLs or remove the dead ones and then we have a new revision. We could also explore to use Pandoc. Which will enable us to export the material in many formats, making it future proof as well. I don’t want to touch any of the material. I just want to get rid of the dead URLs and have a mobile friendly solution. Your personal background within the context of the project: During my masters I used Pandoc a lot. Estimated timeline in terms of time boxed deliverables: Simply checking the URLs can be done with a Bash or Python script, depending on which format the book is written. With the usual parttime efforts in the movement, this may be done in month. Depending on how many will contribute of course. I suggest to put the source material on GitHub/GitLab for collaborative reasons. People may then submit pull requests. Resources needed or already arranged: We need the source material of the book. If that’s not available, then we can’t proceed. If we do, then we have to work on the URL checking and converting it to e.g. Pandoc. I suppose this is a project for the @education-team
To-do list:
Get the original text of which the PDF is created in order to make changes
Share the pristine version here on the forum as received by @Marcos_Cueva
Setup a method to do version controlled changes
Discuss and consider a voting mechanism for commits to ensure quality and proper reviews
Consider to setup our own GitLab environment
To reiterate in a simplier language: this project is about verifying and updating dead links in a pdf file of which we don’t have a source file.
At least that’s what I understood by re-read project’s description a few times.
If that’s the case, kind of interesting project. A good starting point in revision to make TZM more open, which is one of the reasons it is failing regardless having some quality works done.
That’s indeed the goal, purge dead URLs and when possible update them with new ones. Such as links about the international forum can be replaced with the URL of this forum. And many, many other links like that.
And having an ePUB format would make it readable in the 2020’s (although ePUB isn’t that new, but it’s more normalized now I guess).
But this depends on getting the source material. It is possible to convert the PDF into a .doc or Markdown text file. But that conversion isn’t flawless and I don’t have the time to correct all the minor mistakes that might happen. A pristine copy, i.e. source material, would make it more doable.
No word from Peter yet (this was expected, he’s a very busy person). However, we might get a copy from the translation project. I’ve asked the LTI team about this in this thread.
Seems to include some more names that contributed to the book.
Yesterday I tried to contact LinguisticTeam@gmail.com
And I have equally diminishing hopes, same as contacting Peter J. directly.
I know a few of those people, the ones I know have stopped working with TZM (Douglas, Frederico, James, Ben, Matt and Jason). That may leave @bjk and @Gilbert_Ismail. But I don’t think they kept an original copy for that long.
Until I’ll receive a word from PJ or someone from LTI, I’ll mark this comment as solved and let it auto-close itself. If anyone has access to the source material, please send my a direct message via the forum and I’ll reopen this project thread.
Got a reply from Peter. Unfortunately he doesn’t have the original text as a non-PDF file either. Would’ve been cool to especially have an eBook compatible version. I’ll leave the topic closed, but if anyone wants to pursue this further, DM me with your motivation and I’ll open up this topic again.
We have a docx version of the book! And it converts to markdown without much problems. In other words, this project can now continue. I’ll probably upload it to GitHub soon. Why GitHub? Because it allows for pull request. GitLab only has that as a paid option it seems.
To be continued, probably in 2022, since I’m very busy at the moment.
It seems to be the original docx of which the PDF was exported from. Moving forward it would be best to prepare a markdown format so that we can export to any format. Making it future proof and easier to manage.
I’m not a huge fan of editing the docx, since it wouldn’t allow version control. I prefer to have this transparency when we make this a community project.
The markdown file is too large to be used here on the forum. Otherwise we could’ve promoted a topic to a wiki and call it a day
Then we can also setup a pipeline that automatically will do a pandoc PDF and eBook export when a new commit is merged. Making sure it builds and the latest version is available. But for sure that’s a 2022 project!
For now, it really looks like a converted one .pdf -> .docx that I’ve personally done few days ago.
I tried to export this .docx of Kees to the .pdf, and it really have the same Book title (unaligned) rendering issues as the unoriginal. [I used the latest Microsoft Office]
So far I did not seen any autheticity to this .docx file of Kees.
Really feels like a converted one I’ve made myself.
Maybe further investigation might show anything, but I do doubt to see difference from a random .pdf ->.docx ->.pdf converted version of TZM Defined.
I will ask Peter if he still has the source material available. Maybe we can simply update the URLs or remove the dead ones and then we have a new revision. We could also explore to use Pandoc. Which will enable us to export the material in many formats, making it future proof as well. I don’t want to touch any of the material. I just want to get rid of the dead URLs and have a mobile friendly solution.
