On Wed, October 17, 2012 10:43 pm, James Adcock wrote:
Italics are used only once in the file, and then only for a single word.
Well, call it what you like but the "Dear Santa" stuff -- whatever you want to call it -- drives real readers nuts.
Don't blame me, blame McGuffy. Back when I was in elementary school one of the things we were taught was how to do cursive writing (I understand there is a movement in education to quit teaching this subject). This is also one of the subjects which is attempted to be taught in the McGuffy reader. The "Dear Santa" section you refer to is presented as an exercise in orthography; students are presented with a letter in cursive, ostensibly written to Santa Clause, which they are instructed to imitate. The cursive nature of this section is problematic. Presumably, the /best/ solution would be to include an image of the letter, as was done in the Microsoft word and PDF versions of the document at Project Gutenberg, and this is an alternative I may return to. In the interim, what I did was to transcribe the letter, then mark it with <div class="write"> to indicate that it should be rendered as handwriting. There are other "slate exercises" in the book that I have not yet marked up, and I will probably treat them in the same way. The associated CSS file specifies the font to use (cursive), which you are apparently unhappy with. Just download the file, and change your standard gutenberg.css file to use the font that /you/ are most comfortable with. Or don't use a CSS file at all, and get a less appealing version, which is still superior to that provide by Project Gutenberg. (You can do this online with IE and Firefox by selecting "no styles" in your browser options). The whole point of CSS standard usage is that you can obtain a CSS file that most closely represents your tastes, and those choices will be reflected in all files.
Combining diacriticals are not well supported among user agents, especially the less capable ones like the Kindle.
Not sure a Kindle even knows what a combining diacritical is. However, they hose many more "capable" products too. Haven't seen any product anywhere which supports them well. Do you know of one?
I used the free Microsoft Visual Web Developer (http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads#d-express-windows-deskto...) to edit this file, and it handled the combining diacriticals just fine. IE 8 and Firefox 16 recognize and display the marks, but don't back up quite far enough to be crystal clear. I haven't yet created the ePub version, so I can't comment yet on how they are handled in ADE or CoolReader. The main problem is what to use as alternatives. About 3/4 of the combined characters have single value code points scattered throughout the Unicode charts. But the remaining 1/4 of the characters have no single value alternatives; combining diacriticals is the /only/ way to represent them. By using combining diacriticals I can represent /all/ of the characters used by the book, and I limit myself to a single Unicode range (0300-036F). By using combining diacriticals I have preserved the content of the original book, and if there are devices that do not support this portion of the Unicode standard it should be trivial to run a transformation on the file to convert those characters to something that the device in question supports. Life is full of trade-offs.