About this book
The Household Cyclopedia is a book of general knowledge printed in 1881. It was scanned and reproduced as a website by Matthew Spong in 1998, and converted to a printable file in 2005. See below for more notes on the recent history of this book.
January 2005
As you will read in the notes below, this book began it's life as an old leather-bound tome on a market stall, which l scanned into the computer and rendered as a web site. The site may still be online at http:/ /www.mspong.org/cyclopedia when you are reading this.
Although useful as a web site, I lately realised that what the book really wanted was to emerge into the real world again, to be printed out on paper. This didn't seem like too much of a problem, until I realised that the index would need to be redone.
I searched for a way to preserve all the links which I had constructed, to make the click able index when building the website, and turn those links into a n index with correct page numbers. At first l thought RTF was the correct format to convert the site to, and spent a lot of time in futility trying to get Microsoft Word to import my handmade RTF files. It turned out to be too clumsy and prone to errors. Then I remembered l5TEX. I first became aware of this system when visiting my friends Graham Mann a nd Waleed Kudos at UNSW. l noticed his odd choice of reading matter, from the spines of his manuals. "Hmmm, latex..." mused. He quickly explained that it was a document typesetting system, which took a text file and converted it to Postscript ready for the printer, with formatting. He mentioned that it did footnotes and indexing really well. So I started learning the language, and converting the site page by page into the document you now hold. I used PDF TEX because it used images in pdf files, which are much smaller than the Postscript that normal TEXdemands. used a short perl script to replace the anchor codes in the text with the matching entries from the index pages themselves. For the most part the index shows the same text as the index which was in the original book. In fact, I made some small logical fixes to the index, eliminating some sub-entries where there was only one sub and one main entry
hope you find this work informative and useful. It's well within the public domain, so you can do whatever you wish with the material.
Matthew Spong elric@zip.com.au
Note: The following notes date from the days when this book existed only as a website, and mostly refer to changes in the format or problems with hosting.
July 2003
I've embarked on another round of promoting this site through the newsgroups, so I expect a lot of new visitors. This site should be available at this address [http:/ /www.mspong.org/cyclopedia] for awhile, as I have actually paid for my web space this time, and own the domain. Mooching off friends servers and hosting with public portals isn't the right way to go about providing an important resource like this.
