[bksvol-discuss] Re: Stripper, get outa town!

  • From: talmage@xxxxxxxxxx
  • To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 10:27:27 -0500

Hi Pratik,

I have to disagree here.
The concept of the header stripper is to save work, but the actuality is that the program implemented at Bookshare at this time does anything but save effort. The issues related to the stripper have been discussed for years now, and the responses have all been how to work around the problems. We've been normalizing headers, adding blank lines, deleting blank lines, adding page numbers, moving page numbers, and trying a number of other techniques, all in the pursuit of finding a fail-safe method to make sure the header/footer stripper doesn't behave in an over zealous manner. This is getting ridiculous! All this effort going into fixing headers just so the Bookshare software can strip them out.
Now I have to say, that since being involved with Bookshare since the beta days, I don't recall seeing any real changes of consequence to the stripper. Perhaps as another of the beta testers, you'll remember one, but I can't. Regarding the stripper, this isn't rocket science here, it's a rotten algorithm,
and should be replaced or ditched. Now I suspect that as Bookshare is a not-for-profit entity, most of the effort from the software techies goes into system administration, and not development, so their time is probably at a premium. There are however, probably quite a number of programmers here on the volunteer list that would be willing and able to work on a collaborative project. Now I imagine there would certainly be a number of objections to a collaborative effort, but I can't think of any that truly have merit. After all, if I'm not mistaken, Bookshare is running under Linux, which itself is probably one of the most widespread joint efforts.

Getting off his soap box,
Dave

At 07:51 AM 2/5/2005, you wrote: 
1.  Despite all information to the contrary, all page numbers should be at
the top of the page.  If they appear at the bottom, they should be moved to
the top.  This will ensure that the stripper  looks at nothing more  than
that top line.


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