Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
here's that alice pdf i mentioned on friday. it's at:
http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/alice01/alice01/alice01.pdf
it doesn't represent a finished version, not quite yet, but i posted it because it demonstrates some issues.
Nevertheless, it really looks quite good. Almost completely usable.
the biggest reason for the dense typography -- and the rationale behind the small leading -- is because the lines are of very long length. the file has a line-length that is rather typical of the e-texts found in project gutenberg. (the longest line in the original alice30.txt is 77 characters; 33 lines are 66 characters long or longer. that's too long.)
I'm confused: why can't you simply re-flow the paragraphs to get whatever line length makes sense? Reading later in your message, I see that this is precisely what you propose. So why worry about line length in the text version? [snip]
instead of breaking lines according to character-count, we should break them according to _string-width_ in a _proportional_font_.
although different fonts can vary greatly in terms of their width, the bulk of reading comprehension studies indicate that a length around 50 characters is optimal, so that's what we should aim at. (to equate the figures, 50 12-point characters is about 300 pixels.)
This, in particular seems quite surreal: why would I wrap my fixed-width text *as if* it were proportional? And what font metrics should I use? [snip]
one reason i'm showing you this output with their original hard-wrapped lines is so that when i later show you output with the "default" soft-wrapped lines, you can compare them. and then when i show you output with my "adjusted" linebreaks, you'll be able to compare those results to the other two instances.
I know from many previous discussions that a general solution to re-flowing un-marked-up text like we see in PG is a hard problem. I do fully agree that some very simple conventions can make it quite a tractable problem, without forcing us to use full-on markup. I'm looking forward to seeing what you've come up with.
(it's not that i expect anyone here to actually care that much, or even at all; but if there _does_ happen to be someone who does, i'll satisfy their curiosity.
I care. I'd care more if all this stuff was a SourceForge project that I could poke at and tinker with and re-format my own samples. But I still care, even if it's your private project. [snip]
the issue on which i would most like feedback is how to handle the illustrations. [snip]
Don't re-size. Have them float to a suitable location. If [Giant Alice watching Rabbit run away.] on p13 was an illustration, you're formatter mishandled it. Also [The Cheshire Cat fades to a smile.] p59 and [Executioner argues with King about cutting off Cheshire Cat's head.] p82. There's something wrong with the text at the end of the line with "'Rule Forty-two. All" p114. Probably a failure on the part of the contributor to abide by the "50 12-point characters is about 300 pixels" rule. ;-) ============================================================ Gardner Buchanan <gbuchana@rogers.com> Ottawa, ON FreeBSD: Where you want to go. Today.