On Sun, 30 Jan 2011, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:

ok, it's sunday afternoon, jim.  where are my .pdfs?

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i visited feedbooks.com, to see what it offers users in terms of customizing the .pdf which is created...

they let you control the pagesize, which is useful, in millimeters!, which -- for americans -- is not...

"Give 'em 2.54 cm and they will take 1.609 km. . . ." How much more do you need??? I'll be if you just used 250 mm to the inch you would never notice as you would be off by under 1%. Adjust by 1/5" for every 50 or 51 mm. Sheesh!!! What could be more simple??? I had a Chinese guy in one of my classes, he was the only one, and I knew it beforehand, who could tell us how far from equator to pole. Again sheesh!!! How can we have lived on this ball so long and not have a measurement system based on the ball? No one uses mils with degrees, either, so easy.

(they tried to make us convert, hadrien; didn't work; and i doubt an effort by feedbooks will change that.)

users are also given options to control the fontsize, the font (a choice of 6, all traditionals you'd guess), and all four margins.  you can also select a template for a4, for a 6" reader, and a 5" reader...  (strangely, here they acknowledge inches as a measurement unit.)

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manybooks.net offers users a similar set of choices...

pagesize (again, only in millimeters), with presets for: a4, letter, sony, iliad, cybook, iphone, nokia, bebook, and jetbook.  they let you specify a body font separately from the heading font, but only give a person 4 choices. they let you specify the pointsize, but also linespacing... albeit it's only in 1.00, 1.25, 1.50, and 1.75 values, but feedbooks didn't give users any control over the leading. finally, manybooks also lets you control all four margins.

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to my mind, both of these sites offer a very good start, but they don't go nearly far enough offering options...

i think there should be many more choices of fonts... (these days, with google-fonts and type-kit and all that, even a web-based service can offer a good font choice).

i also think they should give users full control of leading.

in addition, however, i would offer a host of other options. in fact, with my tool, i _do_ offer end-users more options...

i let them use any font on their machine, and any leading.

i let them control the color of the text.  (down the line, i might let them customize the font and color of specific structural components, like headers, block-quotes, etc.)

i let them control the metadata embedded in the .pdf...

i let them control the run-heads and the page-footers...

i give them the option of ragged right versus justified...

also, because they have the text itself, they can control straight-quotes versus curly, em-dash versus double, and block-paragraphs versus indented.  however, i will be adding capabilities to my program which let the user _change_ all these on the fly, without modifying the text.

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of course, we'll want a few other things your .pdf too, such as a working table-of-contents.  but you can work on those finer points once you get all the basics down...

(and yes, i already offer a working table-of-contents.)

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so, if you want to keep up, jim, you'll need to set up a web-system or an offline app that can offer all that. (and, as some end-users might not have a computer that'll run an offline app, a web-app would be good.)

because you wanna give an end-user the e-book that they want, or -- failing that -- the ability to _create_ the e-book that they want.  at least i assume you do.

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so, anyway, jim, where are my .pdfs?

it would also be good if you could take a look at the latest version of the .html file for "the jungle", and say what still needs fixing, or verify it's a-ok...

remember, i'm not gonna let you slide away quietly.

-bowerbird