Al,

The book has a special meaning to me.  Most of the books I've completed would be classed as too difficult for a beginner.  It just means it takes longer.  I do intend to finish it, and it doesn't have to be finished this week or this month.  I have a pretty good handle on putting in accents, doing ASCII art family trees, etc.

My own preference would be to remove page numbers.  The book has no index, and I want this to work well on a Kindle or a Nook (I own both).

My real question is what Bowerbird wants me to do next and with what.  Every time I think I understand it seems to change.  Bowerbird seemed to be offering an approach that with one lightly marked up source document could produce several different output formats.  I thought that if he could do that with THIS book he could make it work anywhere and that would prove his point.

A monolithic text file has advantages.  I have to insert accents on a whole bunch of Sanskrit names.  If I can do as much of that as possible with global search and replace that's a benefit.

James Simmons


On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 4:58 PM, Al Haines <ajhaines@shaw.ca> wrote:
James - PG has no preference pro/con on page numbers in TOCs or elsewhere. 
 
DP more or less routinely includes them.  Personally, I drop all page numbers unless the book has an index and/or other internal references, such footnotes that refer to other pages or a TOC that's sufficiently complex as to serve as an near index.
 
As for your choice of book, there's nothing wrong with the book itself, but from what I've read here the past few weeks, I think you've taken on a project that's more than your current skills/experience will let you handle easily.  Personally, I never have and never will do an ebook project by starting from a single, monolithic text file.  Far too unwieldy.
 
Al
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: gutvol-d-bounces@lists.pglaf.org [mailto:gutvol-d-bounces@lists.pglaf.org] On Behalf Of James Simmons
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2012 2:24 PM
To: Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion
Subject: Re: [gutvol-d] Producing epub ready HTML

Bowerbird,

I notice a couple of things.  First, you moved all the front matter like title page, TOC, preface, etc. to the  back of the book.  The TOC still has page numbers, and the lines in the TOC link to those pages, not the actual chapter headings.

Second, you have put <pre> tags around some content that should be just blockquoted text.  The family trees should be pre-formatted, but much of what you made pre-formatted text doesn't really need to be.

Third, I notice italicized words also have underscores before and after.

Fourth, I noticed that this book is incredibly long and I was crazy to work on it.

I prefer having the contents of the book be in the same order as the original, and I think PG prefers TOCs with no page numbers.  I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do with this HTML.  Is this the output of a light markup file you will give me?  Is there some sort of web interface coming for working on this?  I could use some clarification.

Thanks,

James Simmons


On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 2:10 PM, <Bowerbird@aol.com> wrote:
james said:
>   Bowerbird has been suggesting using light markup in text files
>   so we can derive other formats automatically and reliably. 
>   He will doubtless have something to say on the subject.

thanks, but no thanks; i've stepped off that merry-go-round.

if hunter wants to know how he could get better results from
marcello's converters, hunter should discuss it with marcello.

i'm more interested in having discussions with people who
want to get better results from _my_ conversion routines...

so, james, what do you think of this .html file of your book?

>   http://zenmagiclove.com/bhaga/bhaga-preview1.html

i left the pagebreaks in for your convenience.  you'll notice
i've colorized the tables, family trees, and some other stuff.
all the styling is inline, but it's a tightly-constricted subset.

take a look at that formatting, comparing it to the p-book,
and let me know where i've gotten any wrong, so i can fix it.

once that's right, we can take a look at the .mobi and .epub.

(those formats are based on the .html, of course, but i also
generate different x/html files for the two different targets.
i'll also break the targets down to even more specific levels,
such as .epubs specialized for the nook, adobe, or ibooks...
there's also a slew of customization options for end-users,
including stuff like paragraph indentation, curlyquotes, etc.)

once you approve, the book is ready to be turned back to you.
thank you for being so patient while it was under my control...

-bowerbird

_______________________________________________
gutvol-d mailing list
gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org
http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d



_______________________________________________
gutvol-d mailing list
gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org
http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d