I downloaded Marcello's top ten in epub format last night and spent a little time looking at them on my Sony Reader: 1. They all have a working html contents page (TOC) which can be used to navigate around the document (and that's better than the older generated epubs), also I think the idea of putting a back link to the TOC on every chapter head is excellent and I shall copy it with my hand-crafted epubs. 2. Using the XML TOC (the .ncx file) works but it takes 3-5 seconds to open, which makes this unacceptable as a navigational tool. This is true for all ten epubs, but it isn't true of other XML TOCs, either for older PG epubs or for my hand-crafted versions. And in many cases these are much bigger and more complex TOC structures. The only consistent difference I can see between the 'marcello ten' and previous epubs is that the structure of the PG licence is included in the TOC, but this isn't that complex, so I'm not convinced that is an explanation. 3. The layout seems to me to be, like the curate's egg, 'good in parts'. Actually that's a bit negative, perhaps 'mostly good but with some irritating flaws' might be fairer. I'll just concentrate on the flaws: - Chapter headings generally are in too big a font size, (or too bold, or with too large margins, or more than one of the aforegoing). I am working on a font-size range of 90%-135% of the browser default in my hand-crafted versions. I find anything smaller is too wearing to read, and anything bigger just gets broken across more than one line (and looks all wrong). Also I would split chapter headings (CHAPTER I) say from the chapter title (COMING INTO THE WILDERNESS) and do the title in a smaller font. And while I'm about it I don't think Latin chapter numbers are practical on the limited screen size of an e-reader (Try to fit CHAPTER LXXXVIII - YANKEE DOODLE COMES TO TOWN from Thackeray's 'The Virginians' (PG8123), or CHAPTER XVI - IN WHICH M. SEGUIER, KEEPER OF THE KING'S SEALS, LOOKS MORE THAN ONCE FOR THE BELL, IN ORDER RING IT, AS HE DID BEFORE from Dumas pere's 'The Three Musketeers' PG1257 to see what I mean). - The front matter isn't always broken into pages correctly (I think, as I don't have the originals). This may seem like niggling, but in a book you often have only page boundaries to delimit important stuff like the title, author, publication date, dedication, etc. from less important things like publishing history, printing history, other titles by the same author, or other titles in the same series, adverts for Mars bars (you can find these in wartime Penguin paperbacks explaining why the price has gone up from 2d to 3d!), etc. I think the interesting question here is whether the layout problems are artifacts of the html/epub generator(s), in which case they can presumably be fixed if other people agree with me, or whether they come from eccentricities of the encoding in rst format by the transcriber. 4. I haven't yet found any block quotes in any of the books. I'm thinking of, for example, poems or, more frequently, letters which Victorian novelists often put into their text. These typically feature smaller fonts and right-justified text (for letter heads, closing compiments, signatures, etc). It would be reassuring to see that rst can deal with those. 5. Having looked at the html in the epub file I find it somewhat harder to read than that in older epubs or html files. Mainly, I think, because it's the product of a generator not a human. If PG goes the rst route I fear we might be at the start of a slippery slope which ends in the rst becoming the only format that can be understood by humans. (And it appears that rst generation is effectively already in production, as instanced by the 'marcello ten'). Has anybody worried about the lifespan or broad acceptance of rst in the wider world? I can only find references to it as a Python documentation tool. How likely is it that rst tools will be available and supported in a few decades, or that there will be stable and detailed definitions of rst by industry standards bodies for implementations to conform to? Bob Gibbins BTW Is there anywhere on the PG site I could put one or two of my hand-crafted epubs for readers of this forum to look at. I don't run my own web site, but as I seem to be slowly coming to the conclusion that hand-crafted epubs using a standard subset of html are the most practical answer, particularly for the thousands and thousands of great books that are already in the PG archive, I suppose I should be prepared to expose some examples for criticism. Original Message:
These 10 books were made with rst:
34605 34654 34978 35031 35034 35044 35077 35078 35079 35080
You can test them on your devices of choice and tell me what doesn't work.
-- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d