Excerpts from Bowerbird's message of Fri Apr 16 16:36:41 -0500 2010:
michael said:
Like many I'm sure (all right, I'm not really sure), I like ebooks/etexts but do not like to read them on a computer screen.
there are many people like you. most of them are old.
which is to say that very few young people feel that way.
it does _not_ mean that all "old" people agree with you; many oldsters are very comfortable reading on screens.
This is largely, no doubt, because I work with a computer all day anyway--a book should be a place to get away from it all for a little.
i'm sorry you hate your job... ;+)
and maybe that's part of the problem. perhaps you don't really hate reading off a screen, you just hate doing it at a computer while you're sitting at a desk.
in which case an ipad might be a very nice solution... (it _would_ save some trees. or maybe just one tree. but every tree we save is one more tree on the earth.)
The natural thing to do is to print the text out and read it. The question then is: how do we typeset it?
boy, you _are_ old, aren't you? :+)
"typesetting" is such a quaint term, charming and cute.
even "desktop publishing" now seems badly outdated.
One of the last two would, of course, do in a pinch, but I was wondering whether anyone else here had any ideas/recipes on how to automatically or mostly-automatically typeset a PG etext for printing.
well, yeah.
but what are your expectations? what are your demands?
if you were to do the job for an individual e-text, perhaps like the one you mentioned, what changes would you make?
let's start with ripping out the legalese and go from there...
you talked about unwrapping paragraphs. you'd do that? (were they too long for you, or too short for you, or what?)
of course you don't want a monospaced font, but which fonts would you settle for? times new roman? helvetica? or do you need an ability to use any font on your machine?
what about paragraphing? block paragraphs, or indentation?
do you want full-justification, or is ragged-right acceptable?
hyphenation, or not? if you could have the original linebreaks, complete with the original end-of-line-hyphenates, would you?
how about chapter-headings? page-top? recto? double-truck?
curly-quotes? typographic em-dashes? footnotes or endnotes?
runheads? do you want pagenumbers? if so, printed where?
what pagesize would you prefer? 8.5*11? or 5.5*8.5 for 2-up?
-bowerbird -- Michael McDermott www.mad-computer-scientist.com