Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Volpi book

In April, after talking to some folks at Heidegger Circle 2017 in Walla Walla, I started translating Franco Volpi's Heidegger e Aristotele. I finished my first pass at the beginning of November. I now need to ensure I've translated words consistently, and that the English is readable. There are a few diagrams I need to render in SVG. But now that I have all the English text in HTML, I can create an app to review the pages.

I grabbed the Italian text from an e-book that circulates. I used a website to translate from the Kindle file to a PDF. Then I used the tools I've developed for other PDF books to get the text out into an HTML file per paragraph. The Kindle version of the book doesn't have page numbers - page 1 is the cover.

With previous book I extracted from PDF to HTML last year, I created an AngularJS app to display the book in browsers, making it easy page through or jump to any page. Earlier this year I wrote an app to try out Angular 2.0. Now, Angular is currently at version 5.0, so I decided to create the app for the Volpi book with the latest Angular and figure out how it works. I ran through the tutorial at angular.io last weekend, and today, I had a day off, and wrote an app for the book.

And it's fully functional: can navigate from ToC to any page, page through, jump to page, flip to the Italian text. And I got it running on beyng.com. Now I just need to pimp it up with some CSS. And add filters to allow users to select their favorite English word for controversial Heidegger terms. And finish the translation.