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Why use GutenMark rather than another text-to-html markup utility? Although GutenMark is a text-to-html markup tool, it is not a general-purpose utility. It is specifically designed to correct the deficiencies of Project Gutenberg etexts. The goal is 100% automatic publishable-quality markup. In other words, to produce books that look as if they had been published. General-purpose tools are not really suited for this.What's the status of GutenMark? GutenMark has reached the stage of being pretty suitable for personal use. It should also be very useful for anyone intending to manually mark up a PG etext in HTML, since it does most of the work for you. For a commercial printing operation -- e.g., a print-on-demand service -- GutenMark has quite a way to go before it could be regarded as satisfactory.
Why does GutenMark discard the Project Gutenberg file header by default? Is this even legal? If you refer to the Project Gutenberg standard file header (an example of which may be seen here), under the section titled DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm", you'll note that Project Gutenberg specifically requires the header (and all other references to PG) to be removed if the etext has been changed. It's unclear whether GutenMark changes the etext sufficiently to activate this clause, but in any case removal of the header is always allowed. Therefore, the default is to remove the header. You can restore the PG header with GutenMark's "--yes-header" command-line option. If you do so, please keep in mind that complying with PG's requirements is entirely your responsibility.
Why does the HTML produced by GutenMark look funny in my browser? Each browser tends to have its own individual quirks that limit the accuracy with which it can display HTML correctly. Here are some of the funny things I've seen: Some versions of Netscape show long dashes ('mdashes') as short dashes. Some versions of Internet Explorer, but not other versions, show a soft hyphen as a U-grave character. Some versions of Konqueror (the Linux-KDE browser) simply discard a lot of special characters, and refuse to right-justify text. The best browser I've seen so far, for displaying GutenMark text, is Internet Explorer 5 on Microsoft Windows (but not on Mac OS X). Remember, though, that the goal of the GutenMark project is to produce good-looking printouts, and only secondarily to produce good-looking browser-based online displays.