Kindle PC Reader

I am running the Kindle PC Reader 1.8.3 and it is dreadful.  Hopeless footnote formatting.

My post on this at Global Curl is somewhat polemical and rhetorical, but really - given the lack of features in the iBook 2 Author tool, both Apple and Amazon are inviting competition.

Kobo's new owners?  I'm thinking of the disregard for Toyota back when they were a minor vendor in North America - only now we are talking China, Indonesia, India and many other cultural regions where Amazon, Apple and Google just don't cut it.  And I don't mean "pages".

For an interesting language with a natural bent for such things as flowing footnotes, see co-expressions in Icon, Unicon, Converge or Object Icon (or constraint-handling rule libraries elsewhere post-PROLOGIA IV and CLP.)

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iBook Author Tool

Here are recent comments from the Apple page on the iBook Author tool:

Customer Reviews
No mathematical notation support
     by D. Ernst
This would be great if there was (1) reasonable support for mathematical notation and (2) a way to import LaTeX documents (the standard for typesetting mathematics). Until that happens, mathematically heavy texts are a no go.

And

No way to note "references"
     by Conrad Fischer
There is no way to note "references" or "endnotes". How do you write a textbook without having references?

But I did not validate either.

I link to this post over at the global Curl community.

netstring markdown md2curl

1)  add a Curl class for parsing netstring such as

14:4:this,1: ,9:netstring,,

with docs note on handling true length of utf-8 strings in light-weight markup.  A PEG parser ?

2)  md2curl is available as name for markdown-to-Curl parser.  See Java PEG parser.  Q: what advantages to having Traits for parsers ?

note: true-length of presented string varies also with Unicode composing marks such as accents for presenting Russian as text in e-learning applications.  Given these issues, a parser in Icon, UNICON or Object Icon seems appealing as an alternative to PROLOG. alternative: compiled Red (Rebol-like).

ironic, in a way, that we move to 64-bit while shy of UTF-16 as we get terabyte DASD and higher-speed networks: 16-bit text could have been planned as the markdown delight (we might even have been spared XML.)

I have a link to this post over at the global Curl community.

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gwt CAEDA

How does the Java-to-JavaScript Google gwt environment compare to the CURL-to-JavaScript (both are eclipse plugins.)

[to be continued]

Instantiations