On 2011–02–21, at 05:41, bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
monday's version is up:
italics bug fixed.
That's better.
html background toned down.
That's better as well, though I asked for a way for the user to choose background and foreground colours, didn't I?...
@@@ scenebreak lines changed to ***.
That's a little better, though it's still ugly. How about spacing them somewhat from each other, and how about some vertical space above and below as well? I don't particularly care how you separate the paragraphs, just make sure there's a decent amount of white space. I don't care whether there's a centered asterisk or three or five, or none at all, or something else (just, please, not something like an @ that no-one would expect in a PG-vintage book).
scenebreaks could also use a fleuron, as shown here:
let me know if you like that or not...
I don't, personally, but it would still be better than a line of @s. (; And it would still need a decent amount of white space above and below.
and i am ready for today's feedback and suggestions. with the user-interface becoming solid
Aha, there we disagree! Please don't tell me you really consider that user interface "solid"! Do _not_ use one unlabelled text box and cryptic, undocumented keywords for everything. That's about the most un-intuitive user interface one could have designed. Use a search box for searching the text, and label it something like "Search:". And a button next to it would be nice as well. Most people are used to clicking buttons when submitting text to web pages, not pressing the return key, so both options should be there. Use another box for loading a text from PG, label it something like "Load e-text:" or something else that will make sense to a "naïve" user, then the text box for the e-text number, and then another button. Oh, and while you're working on the user interface, consider that we will need some way of exporting the generated files. So we'll need a drop-down to choose the file type, I would imagine, as you are going to at least offer HTML, epub and mobi, I think, or what was it? Label that "Export:" or "Save:" or something like that, then the drop-down, and then a button, and when you click that, it will download the file (that is, it will usually open a file dialog to let you choose where to save it, or it will save it in your default location, depending on your browser settings).
we can begin to turn to some of the functionality you'd like to see... first up in that regard, of course, are the conversions.
I think we'll want to leave the rest of the suggestions I've noted down for tomorrow. As you said, we don't want you to burn out, do we? Looking forward to seeing an improved user interface tomorrow, Jana