Freies Vortragsprogramm (Sa, 06.05.2006)

Creating ebooks for use on GNU/Linux machines

von Guylhem Aznar (externe.net)

Samstag, 06.05.2006, Saal 6.2, 16:00-17:00 Uhr

"e-book" is a generic term to present electronic documentation, which can be a book stricto-sensu, i.e a book one may purchase at amazon, but which can also be an electronic newspaper, a technical manual, a comic, etc.

Various free software handhelds such as the Zauruses, or the Nokia 770 are now available. Yet there is very little content legally available for them

Non free handhelds such as PalmOS devices or Windows CE devices only have a little more luck: very often they lack the ebook one may be interested in, such as the Harry Potter serie.

The attendees will learn how get the content one want from publically or non publically available sources, with wget and bittorrent, how to free the content from any DRM rights restriction and access it in a usable format, with tools like openclit, how to reprocess this format using sed, awk, perl, how to package it in an "easy to use" and "easy to distribute" format. The various possible tools and formats (plucker, pdf, rb), with their pros and their cons, will be presented.

Finally, applying this knowledge to ever-changing content, such as electronic newspapers (news.google.com, slashdot.org, etc) thanks to cron and similar tools, will be explained.

Über den Autor Guylhem Aznar:

Born in 1979, GNU/linux user since 1993, Guylhem Aznar is a last year medical resident and a PhD student in CS.

His professional interests revolve around handheld computers, free software, documentation and languages. The topic of his PhD is "Computer support for writing Sign Languages". The topic of his medical thesis is "Helping prescription in emergency situations with handheld computers"

His personnal interests are not far from his professional interests, since he loves contemporary movies, sci-fi series (battlestar galactica, sg atlantis), sci-fi litterature (AE Van Vogt, Kim Stanley Robinson), anime (Knights of the Zodiac, Robotech), and animal life (reptiles, cats).

To fund his various activities, he operates a consulting company called externe.com, specialised in healthcare and high-tech consultancy.

In the online world, he is the coordinator of The Linux Documentation Project, the maintainer of various HOWTOs, the first to have brought Euro support to GNU/Linux, the former maintainer of AfterStep window manager, and the first to have started a Zaurus forum.

Guylhem has given various conferences on many topics in the past years, less since he started his medical residency.

He is currently playing with new free software projects, to come back into the thrilling free software world after years of medical education.