![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Ebook progress
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.
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.
no subject
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.
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!
no subject
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!
no subject
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.
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!
no subject
Haha, yes—I like to think the historical typesetters would be amused at how the technologies of their craft have changed :D