Acknowledgements

The texts

There would not be a freetext.net without the efforts of Project Gutenberg. Their e-texts, re-proofed, re-formatted, marked up and enriched, are the original sources of most of ours.

Content creation

Original texts—usually in ASCII—are imported into Microsoft Word for formatting against our standard style sheets, then exported to XML using custom VBA scripts. Final mark-up of the XML is done by hand using the wonderful, free, 1st Page 2000 from evrsoft.

XML support

The XML processing that converts the e-texts into HTML and creates the author and work summaries from the data in our database uses Sun's Java Project X, Michael H. Kay's Saxon, and James Clark's xp. We are currently moving over to the Apache XML processors Xerces and Xalan, though Saxon in particular is just so good at accessing databases that we might continue to use it indefinitely!

Database support

Our database of authors, works and quotations is currently held in PostgreSQL.

Web server

The web server we use to create this site is Apache running on Linux Mandrake 8.0.