Ebook progress

[regshoe]

Having got copyright clearance from Project Gutenberg for Sir Isumbras at the Ford when it came into the public domain at the beginning of the year, I've been working on making the required files.

This is being an interesting process so far, getting to grips with the intricacies of text rewrapping (you don't realise how many words are more than ten letters long until you have to format line length to within ten-character limits), line breaks (it turns out different operating systems—invisibly—use different systems for marking line breaks, and my computer was using the wrong one—happily I've now got a text editor that can convert them) and so on. After all that, I now have what looks like a workable text file!

The next step will be putting together the html ebook, which I think will be a challenge—my current knowledge of html is limited to what I've picked up from formatting on Dreamwidth and AO3, and this is a bit more advanced—but hopefully a rewarding one. Anyway, it's certainly interesting seeing the details of the work that goes into making an ebook, as well as getting to know Sir Isumbras very well indeed.

Comments

[garonne]

I am very interested in this post! Have been fighting with the same problems... I think I fixed the line break thing, but I need to decide what I'm going to do with hyphenated words. I have a lot of lines that end with half of a hyphenated word, with the rest of the word on the next line. I guess I will need to fix them all by hand.

Where are you getting the information that you need to submit a html ebook? I had been hoping to submit a plain text file. I had found a page on the Gutenberg website that explained what symbols to use in plain text to indicate italics and so on (a system a lot like the markdown in comments here on dreamwidth) but now I can't find the page any more.

as well as getting to know Sir Isumbras very well indeed.

Haha, yes. One thing this experience has taught me is that I will never do it for a book I don't love, and that I'm not happy to read a million times over!

[regshoe]

They really don't make it easy to find the information you need, do they? This page (under 'File formats') suggests that most ebooks are submitted as both plain text and html, with html being the main format. I've been using this processors' FAQ to keep track of what I should be doing. That page has a section on 'end-of-line hyphens' which implies that hyphens shouldn't be used to split up words (I've ended up with quite a lot of 'real punctuation' hyphens in words like 'Anne-Hilarion' and 'to-morrow' at the end of lines—I think those are OK). But I haven't managed to find any kind of comprehensive list of standards or basic template, which you'd think would be pretty essential. Ah well, when in doubt I'm just copying what the existing ebook for The Yellow Poppy does...

Haha, yes. One thing this experience has taught me is that I will never do it for a book I don't love, and that I'm not happy to read a million times over!

:D Definitely!

[garonne]

Thanks for the links! I was reading a totally different set of instructions, which I guess were outdated, and seem to have since been removed.

hyphens shouldn't be used to split up words

Unlucky me! The text I have for The Wounded Name has an average of four or five end-of-line hyphens per page *grimace*.

It's funny to think that almost a hundred years ago, some typesetter spent hours putting in all those hyphens by hand, not knowing that a century later someone else would spend hours removing them :D In fact, not even dreaming that e-books would someday exist!

[regshoe]

Oh dear! Well, hopefully it won't be too much fuss getting rid of them...

Haha, yes—I like to think the historical typesetters would be amused at how the technologies of their craft have changed :D

[luzula]

So...you're not supposed to have hyphens at all at line breaks? Is this because on different screens, the ebook will re-wrap the lines differently, and so if you have hyphens, you'll end up with it look-ing like this?

When I did the layout for my bookbinding project, I wanted an even right margin, which is what LaTeX automatically tries to do anyway. It does this by hyphenating and by stretching the spaces between words, but I had to go in and do some hyphenating and other adjustment by hand anyway.

[regshoe]

I think so, yes. You're definitely not supposed to have any hyphens breaking up words, for just that reason. I wasn't sure about 'punctuation' hyphens at the end of lines (I can't find any definite statement against them, but The Yellow Poppy doesn't have any, which would be unlikely to happen by chance), but, thinking about it, I reckon they would result in extra spaces being added when the text is rewrapped ('to- morrow'). So I'm going through and getting rid of them too—which means more line length woes :D

The ebook for TYP does have nice even margins, which is presumably down to something in the html—I'm sure I'll have to figure that out at some point...