3 ms·

Trevyn, above, mentioned, > The conversion from LaTeX to HTML was expensive: we raised considerable funds, but ran out before finishing Volumes II and III, so

by lvryc 13y ago

Trevyn, above, mentioned, > The conversion from LaTeX to HTML was expensive: we raised considerable funds, but ran out before finishing Volumes II and III, so we are only posting Volume I initially. I don't know too much about digitalisation, but why does it cost so much?

mhartl 13y ago
The LaTeX source of the Lectures is long and heavily formatted, so the conversion to HTML involved writing a large amount of custom software, including lots of tests to catch regressions. In other words, this was a speculative software project; as anyone who has experience with such projects can tell you, it is virtually impossible to anticipate all the problems you'll run into. (The costs would have been even higher had I not worked for a reduced rate, often pro bono, because I wanted to help make the Feynman Lectures accessible to a wider audience.)
- npsimons 13y ago
  I am very grateful for your work, and I hate to pick on details, but surely you reused much of what's already available for LaTeX? I hope you didn't spend much of your time reinventing the wheel. I freely admit that I am probably vastly underestimating the amount of work that went into this, reuse or no.
  - mhartl 13y ago
    We did make use of as many existing resources as possible. If you take a look at the [Ruby on Rails Tutorial book](http://railstutorial.org/ http://railstutorial.org/) and [The Tau Manifesto](http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto), both of which are converted to HTML from LaTeX, you'll see that I have deep experience in such conversions. Combined with my previous role as Caltech's editor for the Definitive and Extended Edition of the Feynman Lectures (and my Caltech physics Ph.D.), this made me uniquely qualified to work on this project, which is the main reason I did it. (It certainly wasn't for the money; the opportunity cost of the time I spent on this project was high.) Unfortunately, there's a vast gulf between "kinda-sorta mostly converted"—which is the best you can get with off-the-shelf converters—and "a faithful representation of the Feynman Lectures". Closing this gap required a large amount of gruesome work.
    - vermontdevil 13y ago
      We should actually do a crowdfunding effort to pay you for your hard work for doing Volume I and for future volumes. Really really appreciate this effort. I've sent this to some of my deaf friends who are studying or trying to get into Physics and they are over the moon about this.
      - edanm 13y ago
        I would absolutely pitch in if someone organised a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for mhartl, even just to pay him back for the current efforts. I'm ecstatic that the lectures now exist online!
npsimons 13y ago
This was one of my first thoughts; I know it's oversimplifying it by a wide margin, but there is a latex2html program in existence.
- mhartl 13y ago
  Unfortunately, there's no general mapping from LaTeX to HTML, so for any realistic pre-written source you have to write many custom modifications to complete the conversion. This is a time-consuming and error-prone process, involving a large amount of custom software.
- lutusp 13y ago
  There are various ways to do this, none of them perfect. Online searches suggest that "htlatex" (for HTML output)and "xhlatex" (for XHTML output) are pretty good: http://tug.org/applications/tex4ht/mn-commands.html http://tug.org/applications/tex4ht/mn-commands.html
magottlieb 13y ago
Hello, all. Many people seem to have gotten the impression from my letter that because we ran out of funds paying for the conversion of FLP Volume I from LaTeX to HTML we need additional funds to complete the conversion. However, that is not the case because some chapters of Vols. II & III were also converted for us (though imperfectly), and after comparing the Vol. I HTML to the original LaTeX, I found I could do the conversion myself quite easily using parametrized regular expression search and replace operations and a minimum of hand-editing. I am able to convert one chapter of FLP from the LaTeX to HTML in about 2 hours. I have been working on completing the remaining Vols. II & III chapters in my spare time, and they are very nearly done. Only a few chapters remain to be converted, and a few others only need some HTML tables. We are planning to make a second release when our two PDF editions (formatted for the desktop and for tablets) are available for sale online. In fact, the PDF editions have been ready for a long time, but the publisher is having some difficulties getting them into their retailers' sales queues. Today we have the first evidence of the publisher's success in resolving the difficulties: https://www.cafescribe.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10001&categoryId=152754&langId=-1&productId=4000000000003036262&storeId=216405&productStoreId=216405 https://www.cafescribe.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Product... So, hopefully it will not be long before we add the completed Vols. II and III chapters to the published HTML edition, with the few remaining chapters to follow shortly. Michael A. Gottlieb Editor, The Feynman Lectures on Physics www.feynmanlectures.info

by lvryc 13y ago

mhartl 13y ago

The LaTeX source of the Lectures is long and heavily formatted, so the conversion to HTML involved writing a large amount of custom software, including lots of tests to catch regressions. In other words, this was a speculative software project; as anyone who has experience with such projects can tell you, it is virtually impossible to anticipate all the problems you'll run into. (The costs would have been even higher had I not worked for a reduced rate, often pro bono, because I wanted to help make the Feynman Lectures accessible to a wider audience.)

npsimons 13y ago
I am very grateful for your work, and I hate to pick on details, but surely you reused much of what's already available for LaTeX? I hope you didn't spend much of your time reinventing the wheel. I freely admit that I am probably vastly underestimating the amount of work that went into this, reuse or no.
- mhartl 13y ago
  We did make use of as many existing resources as possible. If you take a look at the [Ruby on Rails Tutorial book](http://railstutorial.org/ http://railstutorial.org/) and [The Tau Manifesto](http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto), both of which are converted to HTML from LaTeX, you'll see that I have deep experience in such conversions. Combined with my previous role as Caltech's editor for the Definitive and Extended Edition of the Feynman Lectures (and my Caltech physics Ph.D.), this made me uniquely qualified to work on this project, which is the main reason I did it. (It certainly wasn't for the money; the opportunity cost of the time I spent on this project was high.) Unfortunately, there's a vast gulf between "kinda-sorta mostly converted"—which is the best you can get with off-the-shelf converters—and "a faithful representation of the Feynman Lectures". Closing this gap required a large amount of gruesome work.
  - vermontdevil 13y ago
    We should actually do a crowdfunding effort to pay you for your hard work for doing Volume I and for future volumes. Really really appreciate this effort. I've sent this to some of my deaf friends who are studying or trying to get into Physics and they are over the moon about this.
    - edanm 13y ago
      I would absolutely pitch in if someone organised a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for mhartl, even just to pay him back for the current efforts. I'm ecstatic that the lectures now exist online!

npsimons 13y ago

This was one of my first thoughts; I know it's oversimplifying it by a wide margin, but there is a latex2html program in existence.

mhartl 13y ago
Unfortunately, there's no general mapping from LaTeX to HTML, so for any realistic pre-written source you have to write many custom modifications to complete the conversion. This is a time-consuming and error-prone process, involving a large amount of custom software.
lutusp 13y ago
There are various ways to do this, none of them perfect. Online searches suggest that "htlatex" (for HTML output)and "xhlatex" (for XHTML output) are pretty good: http://tug.org/applications/tex4ht/mn-commands.html http://tug.org/applications/tex4ht/mn-commands.html

magottlieb 13y ago

Hello, all. Many people seem to have gotten the impression from my letter that because we ran out of funds paying for the conversion of FLP Volume I from LaTeX to HTML we need additional funds to complete the conversion. However, that is not the case because some chapters of Vols. II & III were also converted for us (though imperfectly), and after comparing the Vol. I HTML to the original LaTeX, I found I could do the conversion myself quite easily using parametrized regular expression search and replace operations and a minimum of hand-editing. I am able to convert one chapter of FLP from the LaTeX to HTML in about 2 hours. I have been working on completing the remaining Vols. II & III chapters in my spare time, and they are very nearly done. Only a few chapters remain to be converted, and a few others only need some HTML tables. We are planning to make a second release when our two PDF editions (formatted for the desktop and for tablets) are available for sale online. In fact, the PDF editions have been ready for a long time, but the publisher is having some difficulties getting them into their retailers' sales queues. Today we have the first evidence of the publisher's success in resolving the difficulties: https://www.cafescribe.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10001&categoryId=152754&langId=-1&productId=4000000000003036262&storeId=216405&productStoreId=216405 https://www.cafescribe.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Product... So, hopefully it will not be long before we add the completed Vols. II and III chapters to the published HTML edition, with the few remaining chapters to follow shortly. Michael A. Gottlieb Editor, The Feynman Lectures on Physics www.feynmanlectures.info