Status of Mercurial / RST project

The hg repository is live with 2 books. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661 For now, only the EPUB, Kindle and PDF versions were automatically generated from RST. Please download those versions to any real ereader devices and comment on the experience. The repository containing the RST sources can be viewed (not edited) here: https://bitbucket.org/project_gutenberg/books/src -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org

On 02/03/2012 09:56 PM, Joshua Hutchinson wrote:
In the Sherlock (1661), the first story is a Scandal in Bohemia, which is the broken down into three parts (I, II, III). In the text, the sections are labelled JUST with roman numerals, but in the Table of Contents, this makes it look like an error.
I've limited the TOC to level 1.
PS I notice you changed all the quotes to "smart" quotes. Did you do that by hand or do you have a favorite (semi-)automated method?
I used emacs regexes and then checked the result with an automated quote checker. The other file already had curly quotes.
PPS Can you get it to generate the HTML on the fly, too? I'm very curious how that compares in quality.
Done. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org

Marcello> Please download those versions to any real ereader devices and comment on the experience. Here's what I see: Pg1342 * You are not following PG/DP conventions on &mdash. If you think the conventions should be changed, then you should get the conventions changed so that the rest of us are not subjected to those conventions either. Otherwise you should follow the PG/DP conventions like everyone else. IE &mdash not spaced. * Standard convention for books is to center chapter titles, perhaps make the bold, make them larger, but do not underline them. I don't believe in the need to make chapter titles hot link back to the TOC, because no e-book readers that I know of don't already have their own built-in conventions about how to get to the TOC, so readers don't need you to introduce your own additional convention. * Paragraph indentation seems a bit large to be attractive compared to most books I've seen on DP/PG. * TOC layout seems unattractive, but I'm not sure what do about TOCs that just have chapter titles 1 to N such as this one. * You are file splitting the EPUB on chapter breaks, which is a good thing, and I wish you would also file split the EPUB on chapter breaks when *HTML* is submitted to epubmaker, since splitting files on chapter boundaries is pretty much well-established convention for EPUBs. And/or if the HTML submitted already has explicit page breaks in that submitted HTML please use those page break both for page breaking and for file splitting in EPUB gen. *I think the use of !important is a very bad idea. Why are you doing this??? *Not sure that .monospaced and .antiqua is actually going to work on legacy Kindles. Have you actually checked this? *Use of negative indents can break small devices, especially when those devices implement margin trimming. * Use of relative font sizing "xx-large" rather than % font sizing is generally more successful for small devices. * Ex units. I would play it conservative and just stay with em units. * .dropcap -- dropcaps don't work, but oh well, everyone tries to do them. * more and more ebook readers are being written to the assumption that the cover art includes title and author. If you do not do this, then the end user may not be able to distinguish which "Blue PDA" they want to read. * you are setting body margins to 1% in epub and it is not clear to me why you think that it is a good idea to do so. I would set body margins to zero, or why touch body properties at all? * you have a page-break-before: right in epub which I assume is a mistake. * in pgepub.css you set body margins of: top=0.5em right=1em bottom=0 left=0.5em; and it is unclear to me why you think any of these settings are a good idea. Besides wasting screen real estate on what are already small machines, it gives the text a decidedly off-centered appearance. * On Klassic Kindles, such as the Kindle Keyboard or the Kindle DX, it seem that your chapter headings have way too much whitespace after the page break but before the chapter title. IE on KK or DX the chapter headings are showing up in the bottom half of the page, which I don't think is your intent. * You genning mobi using Kindlegen V1 or Kindlegen V2 ? "MY DEAR FRIEND,- and "CAROLINE BINGLEY Here are cases where you *are* centering where conventionally I would not expect to see these classes of items centered. Is this really how the original book did them? PDF: *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRIDE AND PREJUDICE *** -- wraps, in PDF probably should be sized to fit. PDF pages don't seem to print out appropriately sized, and I can't figure out what you were trying to do there, or if it a bug. In any case the PDF page design is pretty unreadable. Readable pages are usually taken to be maybe 50 chars in length, and I count this PDF as having line-lengths of 84 chars, which is way off the mark. Choice of font is pretty darned small in any case, especially since anyone actually wanting PDF and the printed page is presumably of an older generation. PDF "Read Outloud" seems scrambled to me, so it seems like there is something scrambled about your PDF when it comes to Accessibility. *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRIDE AND PREJUDICE *** -- wraps, in PDF probably should be sized to fit. Pg1661 Again I find myself disturbed by the use of "K&R" "Computer Manual" conventions of left-alignment instead of following common paper books and e-book convention of centering chapter titles and subtitles, etc. Or give the submitter the option of formatting using either "book" conventions OR "computer manual" conventions. Same comments as previous book.
participants (3)
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James Adcock
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Joshua Hutchinson
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Marcello Perathoner