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Moving Wikipedia from Computer to Many, Many Bookshelves
- danbruc 11y agoI could never do this - push the project that far and then not print every single volume. Not sure if it is a feature or a bug of mine.
- rndn 11y agoThat's a rather large font though, and no use of hyphenation. Here is the Encyclopædia Britannica for comparison: http://i.imgur.com/qXGfGWa.jpg http://i.imgur.com/qXGfGWa.jpg http://i.imgur.com/obu7D8e.jpg http://i.imgur.com/obu7D8e.jpg
- pimlottc 11y agoFor the love of god, man, justify that text!
- sp332 11y agoWith columns that narrow, it will still look like crap without hyphenation.
- jimktrains2 11y agoI never understood how word processors and web browsers are so incapable of of doing hyphenation. The Knuth algorithm is great and open. It requires a bit more computing power, but I'd rather my computer be doing that then implementing some crappy transition.
- agumonkey 11y agoOh how I'd be happy using a bit more cpu time for that instead of other css3 acrobatics.
- sp332 11y agoI don't think word processors are bad at hyphenation recently. They do optimize for fewest lines instead of least raggedness though. And Knuth's algorithm takes O(n^2) time which could get significant with long documents and seems like overkill to recompute for every keystroke. I guess it could be computed once when saving or printing though.
- jimktrains2 11y agoIt's only O(n^2) for each paragraph, isn't it? A "Rejustify" button that would recompute the proper justification is an interesting idea.
- sp332 11y agon is the number of words, according to Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_wrap_and_word_wrap#Minimum_raggedness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_wrap_and_word_wrap#Minimu...
- jimktrains2 11y agoThat's what I meant, it's O(n^2) for the words per paragraph I thought, not the entire document.
- sp332 11y agoOh right... yeah I guess that's true.
- vmorgulis 11y agoCSS supports that: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/CSS/hyphens https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/CSS/hyphens Just add a special dash character to specify the cut (U+2010).
- jimktrains2 11y agoThat's nice, but why can't it simply do what latex does and figure it out so that it looks beautiful without me having to manually edit every word I want to publish in a way I would never have to anywhere else?
- pervycreeper 11y agoI imagine that is due to the large number of lists and short lines in Wikipedia.
- mark_l_watson 11y agoI had a lightly similar idea that I hope to implement this summer. I mention my idea here in case someone else wants to do it first (and save me the work!). I keep just the text for the English language articles on my laptop in a text file, one line per article. It is a little more than two gigs. My idea is to compress the text using a ZIP entry for each article, build a Lucene index for local search, add a small Java web app to search and peruse a local copy of Wikipedia (or host it for family and friends) and package it all in one Java JAR file. This could provide a useful local copy of the text in Wikipedia in one handy 4 or 5 gigabyte file. The downsides to this idea: no media files and it would not be up to date. Edit: I use the Wikipedia text for NLP experiments, including finding entities (my own code) and processing with both Open Calais and Standford NLP libraries.
- sjs382 11y agoThere are lots of Offline versions of Wikipedia. Some have search, some have media, etc. Here's one: http://xowa.sourceforge.net/ http://xowa.sourceforge.net/
- mark_l_watson 11y agoThanks, that looks good. I might still try my idea for a compressed.text only version but I will try xowa first. Thanks again.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoWith the recently released 512GB microSD cards, you could carry all of wikipedia around (not text only). EDIT: It appears that since 2013, Wikipedia can fit on a 128GB SD card, including images. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/all-of-wikipedia-can-be-installed-to-your-desktop-in-just-30-hours/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/all-of...
- vmorgulis 11y agoThere is also Kiwix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwix). It can download recent wikipedia dumps as torrents.
- Splendor 11y agotl;dr: "He will not, however, be printing all 7,600 volumes."
- danbruc 11y agoBy the way, I'd love (Google Maps) satellite imagery printed onto a sphere large enough to be able to see every house and street on earth. Unfortunately 127.42 meters diameter (1 mm = 100 m) and a magnifying glass is probably as small as you can make it without losing the ability to look at everything without a microscope or something similar.
- vmorgulis 11y agoIt's a good idea. It's feasible with a balloon.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoWould make an incredible outdoor work of art.
- jononor 11y agoIf you do, please make sure the sphere can be rotated so one can look at a particular place!
- spiralpolitik 11y agoDon't suppose he's planning to release the source for the scripts he's using to compile the books.
- hachacha 11y agoThe source code can be found here: https://github.com/mandiberg/printwikipedia/ https://github.com/mandiberg/printwikipedia/ . It will be updated to the most current version and cleaned up once we are done dealing with monitoring the uploading process. Check back in two weeks.