Welcome

This is a small package of software to enable you to create a hypertext version of the Project Gutenberg release of Paradise Lost (edited by Prof. Raben). It was written by Nathan Torkington, working for the Computer Services Centre of the Victoria University of Wellington.

Distribution

You should have received in this distribution:
README
This file.
README.html
This file, but in HTML format.
copyright.html
The copyright and disclaimer on this text, in HTML format.
description.html
A description of the text, in HTML format.
home.html
The home page for the text, in HTML format.
make-plrabn
A shell script to call the other scripts.
split-plrabn
A perl script to divide the text into files of one book each.
strip-plrabn
A perl script to strip the comments from the raw file, and mark it up with HTML.

What you will need

A Unix compatible (POSIX might possibly do) machine that has Larry Wall's Perl interpreter (available for FTP from many sites -- check archie for more information) and approximately 1.3Mb of free disk space (1Mb is needed for the final version, but splitting the entries into separate files temporarily requires more).

You will also need a copy of the copy of the etext in its original plain ASCII form. It is available via anonymous FTP from mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub/etext/etext92 as plrabn12.txt.

Important!

READ THE copyright.html AND description.html FILES -- there are restrictions and disclaimers that must be read before using or reading this work.

What to do

  1. Extract the distribution into a directory with the ASCII text file of the edition of Paradise Lost you wish to mark-up.
  2. Edit the file make-plrabn and set the variables SOURCEFILE, and PGHOME to reflect how you want it set up. It is set up to work with the plrabn12 version of the thesaurus -- if you are using an earlier version, you must change the SOURCEFILE variable.
  3. Ensure the files make-plrabn, strip-plrabn , and split-plrabn are all executable by yourself.
  4. Change directory to the directory with the distribution and run the command ./make-plrabn to create the files.
  5. If all went well, you can now remove the plain-text version -- the WWW version does not need it.