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