Dragaera

Another Turn of Subject

David Dyer-Bennet dd-b at dd-b.net
Fri Jun 7 11:32:04 PDT 2002

Nancy Thuleen <nthuleen at students.wisc.edu> writes:

> (Xthread: now see, if I'd had an e-book version of Dragon, I
> wouldn't have had to flip through so many pages -- but on the other
> hand, as someone else pointed out, I knew the scene I was looking
> for was at the top half of a right-hand side page, and I don't know
> if I'd have been able to find that in an e-book.  Still, I'm for
> them, in general terms.)

Okay, here's a bit of a teaser.  I'm working on putting together a
search engine with access to the full text of the books (I've got 4
books to work with, and now I'm working on getting the search engine
part going; it'll be quite a bit of work to complete the set of books
when that's ready).  This should make it easy to look for things like
that.  

The way existing search engines work isn't ideal for this -- they find
a *document*, and don't go into details on hits within that document.
So I've got htdig working in my test environment, but it's not really
returning useful information yet and I'm pondering how much I can do
by working with templates, and how much trouble it would be to go into
the actual code.  I think it assumes a very different model,
unfortunately. 

But I hope to get something working eventually.  It'll probably return
hits mostly in terms of "20% into chapter 7 of _Dragon_" or something;
because one constraint is we don't want it to give away the text of
the books *too* easily.
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net  /  New TMDA anti-spam in test
 John Dyer-Bennet 1915-2002 Memorial Site http://john.dyer-bennet.net
        Book log: http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/Ouroboros/booknotes/
          New Dragaera mailing list, see http://dragaera.info