ok, greg, new versions of "pride and prejudice", incremental improvements for the tournament.
http://zenmagiclove.com/prapr/prapr.mobi http://zenmagiclove.com/prapr/prapr.html http://zenmagiclove.com/prapr/prapr.zml
http://zenmagiclove.com/prapr/prapr.ncx http://zenmagiclove.com/prapr/prapr.opf http://zenmagiclove.com/prapr/prapr.jpg
*** i learned some interesting things doing this... i began by stripping some cruft from my .css. as i did, more and more, i started to wonder how much of it i could strip out completely... it turned out that i could strip out quite a lot, and still get out essentially the _same_ .mobi. until eventually i dispensed with the stylesheet. what's in the .html file above is now just this:
p {} blockquote {background-color:yellow;} i {color:blue;}
and that's only to prove that kindlegen doesn't disregard the stylesheet, like some people say. because you will see those colors _do_ work -- when you display the .mobi on a color machine. but it's also true that kindlegen _does_ ignore a lot of the stuff you might put in a stylesheet. most especially, it seems, margins and padding. it's the exact equivalent of the hard lesson that designers had to learn as they went from print -- where they could control almost everything -- to the web, where you "control" almost nothing. they had to force themselves to abandon their desire for full control, and embrace flexibility. and that's why i wanted to run an experiment where i relinquished all that i possibly could, where i said, "ok, then show it how _you_ like." and know what? it didn't do a bad job at all. i was fine with it, aside from a couple details... one such example: it didn't center the headers. so i moved those exceptions into in-line styles, and boom, a simple-yet-quite-acceptable mobi. a list of the .html tags -- the complete set that is used in this book -- is appended to this post. but the bottom line is simple: let go. go zen. there are thousands and thousands of books in the p.g. library that can be treated this way. -bowerbird [mbp:pagebreak] == pagebreaks [div id="chunk0""] == sections [h2 style="text-align:center;"] (h1, h2, h4) == headers [p] == paragraphs [p style="text-align:left;text-indent:0;"] == table-of-contents [p style="text-align:center;text-indent:0;"] == scenebreaks [i] == italics [br] == breaks [hr] == horizontal rules [blockquote style="text-indent:1.25em;"] == blockquotes [a id="chapter_1"] == internal-idnames [a href="#chapter_1"] == internal-links [a href="http://zenmagiclove.com/prapr/"] == external-links [p style="text-align:right;"] == chapter-links