Bruce Albrecht wrote:
Marcello Perathoner writes:
We don't know which ebooks contain essential illustrations.
Some ill-advised PPers have started producing books with such useless fluff as drop caps (included as images) fancy horizontal rules (included as images) etc. Including those will only put off PDA users.
Some people enjoy the reproduction of the decorative elements from the original book.
But the cost is too high. Especially the illuminated drop caps break the etext when viewed in many user-agents. This is how #7870 looks in lynx: --- THE PATERNOSTERS. A YACHTING STORY. A ND do you really mean that we are to cross by the steamer, Mr. Virtue, while you go over in the Seabird? I do not approve of that at all. ... --- It also breaks in plucker, and will drive anybody mad that uses the text as source for automatic processing, like text-to-speech etc.
If the decorative elements were in a class, could your plucker distiller leave them out?
It could leave the image out. But the text will still be broken because it uses presentational attributes (float: left) to make a drop cap. To automatically re-insert the letter into the paragraph it was explicitly floated out is beyond hope. I'll have to write a patch to the distiller, then convince the plucker developers that this is a useful feature, ... much work that would better be spent elsewhere. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org