A vague huzzah.
So Grandma's book is now coded up to volume 2.
A bit of explanation ... Three years ago, I couldn't for the life of me find a job that would allow me both Sundays and Wednesdays off (Sundays for church, Wednesdays for counseling at whatever time it happened to be scheduled). After a couple months of fruitless searching, my parents decided to hire me to help around the house.
My main task would be to go through my grandmother's autobiography. She'd written four volumes before a series of strokes and geriatric dementia took their toll, and while there were copies enough for each of her children, the grandchildren sort of lost out. (The books together account for about 2,000 pages and weigh something like twenty pounds.) Mom's goal was to put the books on CD in one way or another; her first idea was to convert the whole thing to a PDF.
The PDF idea was scrapped when we received a PDF book-on-CD from another family historian ... it nearly killed the computer, it was so huge. Mom suggested we try setting the books up as Word documents, but there's always the people out there who don't have Word on their computers. (These people really exist.) So in the end ... we decided to put it into HTML. This way, each chapter would be its own page, with links to the previous and next pages and a central index/table of contents. This also meant that a lot of full-page illustrations and the like could be reduced to links to images in order to save type space. (Not to mention we could quietly remove all the articles from the National Enquirer that Gram had put into the book. It lets her own words come through a bit more.)
So I spent the summer of 2005 mostly in my room, putting together a system for page navigation, scanning every image I could, and then coding the actual text to flow decently well around the plethora of photographs and other images. Meanwhile, Mom spent her time copying the text of Volume 2 and some of Volume 3 into Word documents so I'd have an easier time copy-pasting them into the HTML pages. By August, I had most of Volume 1 completed, with a good chunk of Volumes 2 and 4 underway. (Volume 4 included every Christmas letter Gram had ever sent, so I spent some time scanning and retyping those.) And then it was time to head off to school with a massive project unfinished.
If you've read all this, then you deserve a special reward. Click the period for a photo of a man dressed like a cigarette. So over this break, I spent some more hours getting things coded and entered and whatnot ... and I was able to make a dummy disk of Volume 1 that could be put on CD and distributed among the family. And I was able to get Volume 2 all but finalized, and I'm working on scanning all of Grandpa's military documents right now.
Maybe I can take one of the dummy disks as an example of what I can do with enough encouragement. I feel vaguely proud.
A bit of explanation ... Three years ago, I couldn't for the life of me find a job that would allow me both Sundays and Wednesdays off (Sundays for church, Wednesdays for counseling at whatever time it happened to be scheduled). After a couple months of fruitless searching, my parents decided to hire me to help around the house.
My main task would be to go through my grandmother's autobiography. She'd written four volumes before a series of strokes and geriatric dementia took their toll, and while there were copies enough for each of her children, the grandchildren sort of lost out. (The books together account for about 2,000 pages and weigh something like twenty pounds.) Mom's goal was to put the books on CD in one way or another; her first idea was to convert the whole thing to a PDF.
The PDF idea was scrapped when we received a PDF book-on-CD from another family historian ... it nearly killed the computer, it was so huge. Mom suggested we try setting the books up as Word documents, but there's always the people out there who don't have Word on their computers. (These people really exist.) So in the end ... we decided to put it into HTML. This way, each chapter would be its own page, with links to the previous and next pages and a central index/table of contents. This also meant that a lot of full-page illustrations and the like could be reduced to links to images in order to save type space. (Not to mention we could quietly remove all the articles from the National Enquirer that Gram had put into the book. It lets her own words come through a bit more.)
So I spent the summer of 2005 mostly in my room, putting together a system for page navigation, scanning every image I could, and then coding the actual text to flow decently well around the plethora of photographs and other images. Meanwhile, Mom spent her time copying the text of Volume 2 and some of Volume 3 into Word documents so I'd have an easier time copy-pasting them into the HTML pages. By August, I had most of Volume 1 completed, with a good chunk of Volumes 2 and 4 underway. (Volume 4 included every Christmas letter Gram had ever sent, so I spent some time scanning and retyping those.) And then it was time to head off to school with a massive project unfinished.
If you've read all this, then you deserve a special reward. Click the period for a photo of a man dressed like a cigarette. So over this break, I spent some more hours getting things coded and entered and whatnot ... and I was able to make a dummy disk of Volume 1 that could be put on CD and distributed among the family. And I was able to get Volume 2 all but finalized, and I'm working on scanning all of Grandpa's military documents right now.
Maybe I can take one of the dummy disks as an example of what I can do with enough encouragement. I feel vaguely proud.