Attractively formatting Project Gutenberg texts
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What is GutenMark?
What is Project Gutenberg?
The Problem
What's the Solution?
How does GutenMark fit in?
(GutenMark is not affiliated with Project Gutenberg in any way.)
It turns out, for many of us, that we really do prefer the more attractive printed version over the "plain-vanilla" PG version. In other words, we'd rather buy the book than read the online etext. I fear that this effect has limited PG readership somewhat.
The situation has improved somewhat in recent years, in several ways. Special software for reading the online books can make the books appear more attractive on the computer screen. There is a project of the HTML Writers Guild to provide XML versions of PG etexts. Even PG itself is now willing to accept formatted versions of etexts, as long as the plain-vanilla version exists also. I applaud all of these efforts, and I hope it does not denigrate them to add my own efforts to theirs.
In other words, Project Gutenberg has retained the content of the books in converting them to etexts, but has discarded the formatting. GutenMark aims to restore the formatting.
(In fairness, I should point out that there are other alternatives to GutenMark that you might want to consider. First, although Project Gutenberg likes to serve you plain text, it may also make other, fancier formats available to you for selected etexts. Check this out at gutenberg.org. Also, even when PG does not maintain a fancier version than plain text, the PG volunteers who created the etexts may have such material, and might provide them to you by email; usually, their email addresses can be found within the etexts themselves.)
How well does GutenMark succeed? It depends on the particular etext; in my view, it works pretty well. To give you some idea, here is a small, sample etext, processed in various ways:
You might need to download free Adobe's Acrobat Reader program to view or print the PDF files. The PDF files were created using a freely available utilities, so that you could see a book-like printout. It's important to understand that no manual markup or editing was performed at any stage in these sample files.