Task ③ ⇒ document markup

Display your knowledge of document markup tools

document markup task logo

Find an e-book on the Project Gutenberg website that is interesting to you. Your task is to transform, through skilful formatting, a basic text version of the book into one created to be capable of being printed out as a pocket book.

Retrieve the plain text version of the e-book from the Project Gutenberg site. Start with the main page and use the search tools on the site to find it. But how does one do this?

If you were to be interested in the book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, you would navigate to its Gutenberg location and download the plain text version, in us-ascii format, with no compression and a size of 211 KB, from the main site. Save the document on your client as a .txt file. Once you have the document on your client, open it in the program of your choice and save it in the program's file extension, so you can take advantage of some of the specific tools available in the program. Then format it, following the specifics in the gradesheet.

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Condition

Since the world is changing and e-books are becoming a reality, prepare this task for a client who wants a product ready for loading onto an e-book reader, perhaps something akin to a Kindle. That means the notional paper size to be used is six inches wide by nine inches tall. Of course, you will want to include some whitespace margins around the text. If you wish to format your book for your e-reader, you may make the notional paper size fit your particular version. Mine, for example, has a 3.5 by 6 inch screen space.

You will work either individually or, if you wish, in multi-person teams on this task. If you are assigned the team option, when your team has completed the task, one member of the team will store it in that person's password protected directory. Each of the members of the team will place a hyperlink to it on their respective web sites (the individual storing it will have a relative link to it, the others will have absolute links to the finished task). When it's ready for me to download and grade, send me a note telling me to retrieve it from your websites.

Our class blog has a description of what group work means in the context of this class. Read it.

working in teams

Groups

  1. [Alpha Student, Bravo Student]
  2. [Charlie Student, Delta Student, Echo Student]
I would prefer to have evenly balanced groups.

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Standard

You have a gradesheet to provide guidance. And you may wish to look at this presentation for a guide to how a document markup task might be done. The example here is not exactly the same as your task, but it is similar.

Save the finished product using the standard file name structure for this class.

Everything on that gradesheet will be analogous to something we will have done in class.

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