gut is a program that marks-up Project Gutenberg Etexts to HTML, suitable for reading in any Ebook reader (or any web browser) that supports HTML; e.g. Plucker .

Installation Requirements

You will need perl installed on your system to be able to use gut.

gut has been tested on GNU/Linux and SPARC Solaris with perl 5.6.1. and Windows 98 with ActivePerl 5.6.1.

You may also find pluckbook useful. It is a convenience front-end shell-script to Plucker that converts a HTML file to a Plucker-compatible pdb file.

Using gut under Unix

  1. Download gut
  2. Untar it: tar zxvf gut-1.16.tar.gz
  3. Make it executable: chmod a+x gut
  4. And install the man-page: cp gut.1 /usr/local/man/man.1
  5. EDIT THE 1ST LINE OF THE SCRIPT TO POINT TO WHERE YOUR PERL BINARY IS LOCATED.
  6. Download an etext from Project Gutenberg
  7. Convert the etext to HTML like this:
    zcat etext10.gz | gut > etext.html

    or
    unzip -p etext10.zip | gut > etext.html

    or
    gut < etext10.txt > etext.html

  8. You can preview etext.html in a web-browser or convert the file into a Plucker-compatible file (gutxt.pdb is generated from etext.html):
    pluckbook etext.html 2 gutxt

    (NOTE: pluckbook s a perl script. Please modify the path to your perl binary, the path of plucker-build and where your pdb files are to be stored, before using it).

  9. Sync etext.pdb on your palm computer and enjoy!

Improving Heuristics

gut has heuristics that understands the changing boiler-plate format of the Project Gutenberg Etexts over the years.

gut currently only understands Etexts that contain paragraphs. If you attempt to mark-up plays or poems written in verse, the original formatting will not be preserved.

If you add additional heuristics or improve the current ones and wish to share them with others, email me your changes and I will incorporate them into the next release.

TODO/Wish List

Example Gutenberg ETexts converted by gut:

Change Log: