Electronic book of Gottlob Frege's 1879 book Begriffsschrift.

The goal is to make an easily distributable electronic book of Gottlob Frege, Begriffsschrift: eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens (Halle: Nebert, 1879).

My plan is to publish the electronic book on at least one or two of the most prominent ebook stores (Kindle, Google Play, ...), and also to make it freely available through Github.

The text has been transcribed and the formulas have been checked for grammatical correctness. SVG equivalents for all formulas and inference chains in Parts I and II have been generated.

At the moment, no ebook has been generated. If you are interested, watch this space.

To do (not necessarily in this order):

• SVG generation

  • Find SVG representations for the new notations introduced in Part III.

  • Write XSLT to generate SVG for formulas using those new notations.

  • Generate SVG versions of formulas for part III.

• Spelling

  • Spell check using the framework at my spell-checking-XML repository, either by part or (probably nicer) by section.

• Markup

  • The handling of the signature labels needs work.

  • Some formulas require either footnotes or text-critical apparatus.

• SVG handling

  • The sizing of the SVG needs to align with the sizing of the base text. So the SVG needs to be re-generated using rem units, not ems.

  • In Firefox, SVG images loaded via img don't load SVG images referred to via img. Find a workaround. (This is a problem for the table of contraries and contradictories in section 12, p. 24.)

• Cosmetic

  • The library stamps and handwritten additions need better styling.

  • The title page needs better styling.

  • The table of contents needs to become live, and the generated toc needs to go away, or they need to be merged, or ... something.

  • Simple (unbulleted, unnumbered) lists need to be supported.

• Proofread all formulas.

• Generate test versions of an EPub version of the book, test behaviors in selected e-book readers (Google Play, iBooks, Kindle, Nook); experiment as needed with different ways of handling the SVG. (I would really like to avoid having to fall back to PNG images of the formulas.)

As far as I can tell, Frege's text is in the public domain world wide. The book was published in 1879. According to Wikipedia, Frege died in 1925, so in any country with a copyright term of the life of the author plus 50, 60, 70, 75, 80, or 95 years, the term of copyright has elapsed.

As regards the other material here, I am not currently certain how best to license it. For the moment, the following terms apply (the Markdown needs work, sorry):

• The TEI markup, the kB grammar for keyboarding Begriffsschrift, the kB transcripts of the formulas, and the SVG representations of the formulas are all licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

• All XSLT and CSS code, whether for generating the SVG or for styling the book, is licensed under the GNU General Public License 3.0 (link needed).