Slicing Books for Art

| Tue, September 6, 2005 | Misc.

At a used bookstore in London I found a Bible atlas from 1900 with beautiful colored engravings. I have seen individual atlas pages in old map shops sold for more than this book cost, and it had 11 full page engravings. Few things hurt me like cutting up a book, but these clean, neat 8 x 10 inch pages simply begged to be framed and hung on the wall for everyone to appreciate.

After a quick check on the Internet to ensure that the book wasn’t too rare, we carefully cut out the pages and scanned them at high resolution before framing them. You will see them on the wall if you visit Logos in the future, and you can download this diagram of the tabernacle and the temple right now. (The file is 2.85 MB and the image is 3232 x 2464 pixels.)
The whole set of corrected images (cropped, rotated, color adjusted and scaled to 50%) are available in an 8 MB file.

Spanish Dividends

| Fri, September 2, 2005 | Products

It costs so much to build English-language tools and, incrementally, so little to enable them for other languages that it seems a waste not to do so.

Our large investment in the large English-speaking market should pay dividends around the world, not just here in the US. Building a multi-lingual technology like the Libronix DLS enables that, but users still need Bibles and reference works in their own language.

We’re working on acquiring licenses to those resources, but it is a slow process made all the more complicated by multiple ownership: a Spanish reference work may be a translation, by a Spanish publisher, of an English work, but the translator only owns the print rights and the electronic rights remain with the English publisher, who doesn’t own the translation. (We are working through this, though, and getting results.)

Years ago Logos funded the development of a complete set of biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek lexicons by James Swanson. Controlling the rights as well as high-quality XML source files allowed us to have this Dictionary of Biblical Languages translated into Spanish at a reasonable cost without having to re-do all the tagging and linking. The translators started with the well-tagged English source files and only translated the English, ensuring that the original languages text and extensive links to other resources remained intact.

The Greek dictionary has been translated, and we hope the other volumes will follow soon. Look for it in an upcoming Spanish release.

English:

787 ἄρτιος (artios), ία (ia), ον (on): adj.; ≡ Str 739; TDNT 1.475—LN 75.4 qualified for a function; capable (REB), efficient (NEB), proficient (NRSV), competent (NAB), (2Ti 3:17+), note: many versions use vocabulary that emphasizes the thoroughness or completeness of the equipping; thoroughly (NIV), fully (NJB), complete (ASV, RSV, NKJV), perfect (KJV)

Spanish:

787 ἄρτιος (artios), ία (ia), ον (on): adj.; ≡ Str 739; TDNT 1.475—LN 75.4 calificado para una función, capacitado (RVA, NVI), eficiente, eficaz, preparado (RVR, DHH, TLA), equipado (LBLA) (2Ti 3:17+), nota: muchas versiones usan un vocabulario que enfatiza la meticulosidad o totalidad de la preparación; minuciosamente, completo, perfecto

If You Can’t Afford a Quarter

| Wed, August 31, 2005 | Misc.

…then you ought to give a dime. If everybody gave then we could save the Blue Water Line.

The Kingston Trio wanted to save the home town depot and old engine number nine. I just want to make more books available to Logos Bible Software users.

Our Community Pricing Program is an attempt to let users collectively set the price of a book production project as low as possible. The more people who pre-order, the lower we can make the cost per unit and still cover our production costs.

Community Pricing is an experiment, and it is working. Together you have moved several projects into production and in each case the price per unit has been much lower than it would have been as a traditional Pre-Publication project.

What surprises me, though, is how many orders come in after a project covers its costs in the Community Pricing Program and before we ship it. When a title covers its costs in Community Pricing we move it to the Pre-Publication program and raise the cost. We have been getting as many as 20% more orders after moving a title.

That’s fine with us. The costs are covered, so those orders represent profit for us. But if those orders had been placed in Community Pricing, instead of Pre-Pub, the cost would have been lower for everybody. If you are at all interested in a title in the Community Pricing Program, place a bid now. (Some titles allow bids as low as $2!) If you placed a bid on a title that is hovering around 60%, a small increase by all the bidders can move the book into production right away.

Toggling Zoom with a Custom Toolbar

| Tue, August 30, 2005 | Training

The Libronix Digital Library System is a very modular framework. The user interface is separate from the system internals. This modularity not only makes for a better application architecture, it allows us to deliver new features and user interface without changing the underlying system. (Below I am going to show you how to add a “Toggle Zoom” feature right now, without downloading anything.)

The Libronix DLS exposes its internal interfaces publicly, allowing external applications to control it. It also allows users to add their own functionality, either with an external programming language or with JavaScript inside custom toolbar commands.

The documentation for the scriptable object model is available as a free Libronix DLS compatible resource. The automation newsgroup is where you can ask questions about automating the Libronix DLS and get help from Logos programmers and other users.

I’m going to show you how to add a custom toolbar with a new command that toggles resource windows between their default zoom and 200% zoom. (This is really useful when you are projecting Logos Bible Software in a classroom, or even just leaning back to read.)

[Read more…]

Mouse Gestures

| Fri, August 26, 2005 | Training

It is always a pain to switch from keyboard to mouse and back. “Power users” tend to master the keyboard shortcuts of their favorite applications so that they can keep their hands in one place.

The keyboard is not as convenient as the mouse, though, for navigating a page full of hyperlinks. But when you are following lots of links it is a real pain to keep moving your mouse between the list of links and the back button, or moving your hand back to the keyboard to press “Alt-Left”.
Mouse gestures are a powerful shortcut that can cut your mouse travel without touching the keyboard.

In an open resource window, click and hold the right mouse button while dragging it just a short distance to the left and then releasing the button. This “gesture” executes the Go > Back command. (Assuming you have already followed a link or scrolled, so there is somewhere to go back to.) Right-click and drag to the right executes the Go > Forward command. Up moves to the previous article, down to the next. A “C” shape (left, down, right) toggles the contents pane.

I am not sure who invented mouse gestures, but we first saw them in Opera and Mozilla. These browsers support a long list of gestures, but I don’t often make an “M” shape to view the tags for a page, or “S” to view the source. I do use forward and back all the time and can’t imagine working without them.

I call mouse gestures a hidden feature because they don’t have any visible user interface and so most users never find them. But now you know. A complete list of the gestures supported in the Libronix DLS is in the Libronix DLS Help, under Appendixes > Gestures. Give them a try, and let us know if there are any other commands you would like to access through gestures.

One million pages later…

| Fri, August 19, 2005 | Misc.

APT Book Scanner from Kirtas TechnologiesLast year we took delivery of a robotic book scanner and set it to work in a seminary library. Today we have scanned more than one million pages from more than 3,000 titles.

Ultimately we would like to make all of these books available in the Libronix DLS format, but that represents a lot of keyboarding and tagging. (Automated optical character recognition can help, but is not accurate enough.)

So we are preparing a way to present the scanned page images. We are also putting some of them to use as source documents for the Community Pricing Program. The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul and the J. A. Broadus Preaching Collection are both being prepared from scans, and many other candidates are awaiting your bid.

It’s coming…

| Wed, August 17, 2005 | Misc.


(more details at www.MacBibleSoftware.com)

Logos icon stickers

| Fri, August 12, 2005 | Misc.

Now that we are building Logos Bible Software for the Mac we are buying more Macs. I think that it is pretty cool how Apple encloses a white logo sticker in their package and I have seen them around, on windows and doors and other places.

Our new logo combines a cross and a search icon, which gets to the heart of what our software is about: looking deeper into God’s Word.

So we ordered up a few thousand sheets with just the icon from our logo and we are including them in boxes and pre-pub shipments until we run out. They are vinyl with a removable adhesive, so feel free to stick them wherever you want.

World Factbook

| Fri, August 5, 2005 | Products

The World Factbook is compiled by the US CIA and is just what it sounds like: A bunch of facts about every country in the world. The book also features nice, clean maps of every country and digital versions of the country’s flag. World Factbook cover

Since we published the 1996 edition in Logos-compatible format the CIA has dramatically improved the free online edition, but I still find our edition useful. It brings up interesting data on any country-oriented search, and I use it to get background when I’m preparing to talk with someone from another country. It is also easier to run full-text searches against the Logos-compatible version.

Earlier this year we updated our ebook to the 2004 edition. With all the maps and flags it is a big download, but since we just reduced the price to “free”, it is a great value. Enjoy!

Hot Stuff Delivery

| Wed, August 3, 2005 | Misc.

The Logos Hot Sauce Museum, the developers’ 10 year collection of hot sauces from around the world, was decimated by last year’s fire next door and the attendant smoke damage to our offices. (We liked smoked peppers, but not when the smoke is from burning paint, carpet, etc.)

That’s just one more reason we were so happy to get a New Mexico Care Package from Logos user Bobby Martin.

Hot stuff is always welcome, though we recommend double-bagging the chili powder…