|
|
View Full Version : Format tabbed text columns, NOT flowing
Hitch 05-28-2010, 03:52 PM :help:
Hi, gang:
n.b. - this post is NOT about flowing text through newspaper-like columns.
I have a client who had her rights-reverted books scanned, sent 'em to me in Word to convert, so all good so far. She has one sort of unique aspect to the books; she has a "cast of characters" page(s) in the front, in which the players are identified, e.g.:
John Doe: (imagine a tab of white space here) Sarah's Husband
Michael Black: (imagine a tab of white space here) Sarah's Friend
Jane White: (imagine a tab of white space here) Sarah's Married Sister
I mean, you get the drift. In a word processor, these would be simple tabbed-over to x items with hard returns between them, since there's no "flowing" text.
I am completely clueless how I can format this in Sigil to look remotely reasonable. Does anyone have any suggestions? I've simply not used any type of tabbed (?) function or indentation within a line in Sigil, so insight would be freaking great. This is my first conversion for this client, so I'd be mighty grateful if I could look halfway smart coming out of the blocks, keep getting her books. I searched here and I've already read the manual (twice)....any thoughts?
Thx in advance!
dynabook 05-28-2010, 04:46 PM It looks like you need to use a table. Check out W3C tutorial:
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_tables.asp
Good luck.
Hitch 05-28-2010, 08:10 PM It looks like you need to use a table. Check out W3C tutorial:
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_tables.asp
Good luck.
The last time I looked, .epub did not support tables. If it does now, can somebody udpate me on this? :chinscratch:
Anyone else?
Hitch
Wetdogeared 05-29-2010, 10:53 AM My Star Wars eBooks have a simple Dramatis Personae page, example:
Allana Solo; child (human female)
Ben Skywalker; Jedi Knight (human male)
Han Solo; captain, Millennium Falcon (human male)
Gavar Khai; Sith Saber (human male)
Jagged Fel; Head of State, Galactic Empire (human male)
...
No spaces similar to tabs, but it works for me. Not sure if it will be acceptable to your client.
Hitch 05-29-2010, 02:10 PM My Star Wars eBooks have a simple Dramatis Personae page, example:
No spaces similar to tabs, but it works for me. Not sure if it will be acceptable to your client.
Hi, Wetdogeared:
It's just going to have to do. I'm not going to drive myself even crazier trying to get that bit right; the scanning guy scanned it as though it were going to a POD publisher, so I got all the bloody page headings (book name) and author name, yadda yadda...and of course all the mystery characters from the OCR, so I'm already demented on this one, LOL. I was hoping someone here had worked some div magic, but sans that, I'm rolling with a list like yours. In the light of day, the original Fawcett imprint list wasn't that great, anyway.
Thanks for taking the time to respond on a holiday weekend.
Hitch
pietvo 05-29-2010, 02:56 PM The last time I looked, .epub did not support tables. If it does now, can somebody udpate me on this? :chinscratch:
Anyone else?
Hitch
I just looked it up and tables are a required part of OPS 2.0.
Here is an example (for Sigil's codeview)
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Tables</title>
<style type="text/css">
td {padding-right:1em;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Table demo</h1>
<table>
<tr>
<td>John Doe:</td>
<td>Sarah's Husband</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Michael Black:</td>
<td>Sarah's Friend</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Jane White:</td>
<td>Sarah's Married Sister</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
DaleDe 05-29-2010, 03:15 PM I just looked it up and tables are a required part of OPS 2.0.
I have used Tables in ePUB and ADE supports them sort of. No borders, which is ok for this case, and if they are too wide they just keep going sideways with no way to view the rest, again for this case that may be fine.
Dale
pietvo 05-29-2010, 03:57 PM I have used Tables in ePUB and ADE supports them sort of. No borders, which is ok for this case,
I can get borders in ADE (and also visible in Sigil's Book View) with either:
<table border="1">
or
<style type="text/css">
td {border: thin solid}
table {border-collapse:collapse;}
</style>
Hitch 06-01-2010, 03:22 PM Hi, Pietvo, DaleDe:
Sorry, forgot to subscribe to this thread, like a total wanker. I'll give those tables a shot, but I could have sworn that somewhere around here I read a thread in which the use of tables was strenuously discouraged by the Sigil developer--and my experiences with using tables for html for Kindles has been prtty disastrous via .mobi.
BUT: I'll give it a try. Thank you!!
Hitch
KevinH 06-01-2010, 05:23 PM Hi,
Another method is to make an image from the tabbed columns (even a screen capture of the table) and use the image in place of the table. This works for all ereaders I have seen. You can make the contents of the image "searchable" by including the text as "hidden" html values right before the table.
I have also seen svg used to create images of tabular data as well.
Hope something here helps,
KevinH
dwanthny 06-02-2010, 01:49 AM I'll give those tables a shot, but I could have sworn that somewhere around here I read a thread in which the use of tables was strenuously discouraged by the Sigil developer--and my experiences with using tables for html for Kindles has been prtty disastrous via .mobi.
My knowledge is lacking in this area but I think it might be best to set table size via percentages to ensure they make the most use of the screen size without going over.
Hitch 06-02-2010, 03:18 PM My knowledge is lacking in this area but I think it might be best to set table size via percentages to ensure they make the most use of the screen size without going over.
As a follow-up, just in case somebody else is following the breadcrumbs here:
While it's probable that I could manage a table that would display in Sigil, tables are flat-out not supported in Kindle via the DTP upload function. Since I'm creating ebooks for clients that are going both to Kobo and Kindle, using tables is not an option for me.
But thanks, gang--I am particularly head-slapping myself over the obvious "use an image" response. Duhr! You'd think I'd have thought of that one, because I do it for other clients with some of their weirder uh, stuff. ;)
Hitch
Solitaire1 06-06-2010, 01:26 PM As a follow-up, just in case somebody else is following the breadcrumbs here:
While it's probable that I could manage a table that would display in Sigil, tables are flat-out not supported in Kindle via the DTP upload function. Since I'm creating ebooks for clients that are going both to Kobo and Kindle, using tables is not an option for me.
But thanks, gang--I am particularly head-slapping myself over the obvious "use an image" response. Duhr! You'd think I'd have thought of that one, because I do it for other clients with some of their weirder uh, stuff. ;)
Hitch
Sometimes it's easy to overlook the simplest solution. Once, I had create a word processor file that had to look a specific way and I didn't have access to a PDF generation program. My solution was to print the pages, scan them, and insert each scan into the document as a page. It wasn't elegant but it worked.
Another option I've used to generate a table is to use a fixed font (like Courier New) and just manually space out the table. As long as the reader displays a fixed font as a fixed font it should work.
theducks 06-06-2010, 01:37 PM Sometimes it's easy to overlook the simplest solution. Once, I had create a word processor file that had to look a specific way and I didn't have access to a PDF generation program. My solution was to print the pages, scan them, and insert each scan into the document as a page. It wasn't elegant but it worked.
Another option I've used to generate a table is to use a fixed font (like Courier New) and just manually space out the table. As long as the reader displays a fixed font as a fixed font it should work.
Open Office 3.x (free) has a Print to PDF button.
Eliminate the Scan step ;)
Solitaire1 06-07-2010, 03:04 PM Open Office 3.x (free) has a Print to PDF button.
Eliminate the Scan step ;)
Unfortunately, I didn't have access to OpenOffice.org at that time. I had to do the job in MS Word and print-scan-insert graphic was the only option I had to get the job done the way that it was needed (some pages were landscape, some portrait, and each had to look the same on all computers).
Hitch 06-08-2010, 07:27 PM Open Office 3.x (free) has a Print to PDF button.
Eliminate the Scan step ;)
Indeedy, as do many things these days. I've not tried it, but can't we just print to something like Primo PDF out of Sigil? ;)
Of course, this is completely OT now...stupid columns. Which ended up being the LEAST of my concerns, the bloody spans from MS Word were absolutely horrific. I had to strip the formatting and then re-do every book. What a freaking nightmare.
Hitch
sherman 06-08-2010, 09:17 PM I've played around with some CSS and created a rough Cast of Characters type page in a simple two column layout.
This was created in Sigil, and displays correctly in ADE, Calibre, Sony reader software. Ironically, Sigil for some reason doesn't display it properly unless you resize the book view narrow enough.
I have no Idea how amazon would handle it, although what I came up didn't exactly require rocket science.
Screenshot of how it looks in ADE:
http://www.shermnz.net/images/testepub.JPG
The epub file is attached to this post.
theducks 06-08-2010, 10:29 PM I've played around with some CSS and created a rough Cast of Characters type page in a simple two column layout.
This was created in Sigil, and displays correctly in ADE, Calibre, Sony reader software. Ironically, Sigil for some reason doesn't display it properly unless you resize the book view narrow enough.
I have no Idea how amazon would handle it, although what I came up didn't exactly require rocket science.
The epub file is attached to this post.
:cool:
I added a body style with a width 30em
that keeps it from spreading out.
So it looks as you can wrap your style in with another, that keeps it contained :)
pietvo 06-09-2010, 10:38 AM This was created in Sigil, and displays correctly in ADE, Calibre, Sony reader software. Ironically, Sigil for some reason doesn't display it properly unless you resize the book view narrow enough.
I don't know what you mean because for me in Sigil it displays correctly, whether the view is narrow or wide. This is Sigil 0.2.0 (the latest version). I think the 30/70 division doesn't look nice in wide view but that's besides the question.
sherman 06-09-2010, 06:58 PM I don't know what you mean because for me in Sigil it displays correctly, whether the view is narrow or wide. This is Sigil 0.2.0 (the latest version). I think the 30/70 division doesn't look nice in wide view but that's besides the question.
I'm also using Sigil 0.2.0, so I don't quite know what's happening, most likely a QtWebKit rendering bug.
The 30/70 split was just an example. You can use any combination that adds up to 100%. Heck, you don't even have to limit yourself to two columns if you want more...
|
