Historical Fiction Twain, Mark: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court | v1.2 | 03.08.2012

[mmat1]

A Yankee engineer from Connecticut is accidentally transported back in time to the court of King Arthur, where he fools the inhabitants of that time into thinking he is a magician - and soon uses his knowledge of modern technology to become a "magician" in earnest, stunning the English of the Early Middle Ages with such feats as demolitions, fireworks and the shoring up of a holy well. He attempts to modernize the past, but in the end he is unable to prevent the death of Arthur and an interdict against him by the Catholic Church of the time, which grows fearful of his power. (Wikipedia)

Note: File is large due to illustrations and embedded fonts.

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v1.1: Greatly improved, see below
v1.2: Added increasing font-size and spacing in the spells in chapter 23

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[AlexBell]

Thanks for the book.

For what it is worth, an opinion not a criticism, I like to choose my preferred font from the ones available on my reader rather than have the ebook designer choose the font for me.

[mmat1]

Originally Posted by AlexBell

Thanks for the book.

For what it is worth, an opinion not a criticism, I like to choose my preferred font from the ones available on my reader rather than have the ebook designer choose the font for me.

I guess that depends on your reader. What is it ?

On my PB 622 i can change the font. Exceptions are only the Headlines and the small caps. It was in my intention not to change them together with the rest of the text-body.

Should I issue a version without embedded fonts ?

[SBT]

I took the liberty of cleaning the images in the same way as I did for Alex's "The Woman in White". Now the background is pure white, and the size of the images has been reduced to 2.7 MB. Feel free to use them, or not.
Personally, I like to mess around with mildly eccentric fonts and layouts. Especially for a work like this, which is widely available in other (free) epub editions, I think you should feel free to be as creative as you like in terms of layout.
Following on that, I am going to be wildly inconsistent and pick a few personal nits:

• What about replacing -- with — ?
• Having captions on illustrations with the caption in the actual image seems like an unecessary and redundant pleonasm.
• I render text like in List.gif in an image as a last resort. Any particular reason why you've not rendered it as a table?
• Lastly, I don't think it really works to have a border around illustrations like this, which have a white background and were borderless in the original.

Good work!

This work is in the Canadian public domain OR the copyright holder has given specific permission for distribution. It may still be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. If the book is under copyright in your country, do not download or redistribute this work.

To report a copyright violation you can contact us here.

[mmat1]

Originally Posted by SBT

I took the liberty of cleaning the images in the same way as I did for Jellby's "The Woman in White".

As always, I like your work with images and I will use them. I learned that Gimp is almost overwhelming and some short pointers, how you did it would be nice.

>>What about replacing -- with — ?
I will have a look on that

>> Having captions on illustrations with the caption in the actual image seems like an unecessary and redundant pleonasm.
At the current size, it would be hard to read embedded captions like this (see attachment), especially on a 6'' device.

>> Any particular reason why you've not rendered it as a table?
the dots ...........................................47,000

>> Lastly, I don't think it really works to have a border around illustrations like this, which have a white background and were borderless in the original.

Now the backgound is clean white, so you're probably right.

This work is in the Canadian public domain OR the copyright holder has given specific permission for distribution. It may still be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. If the book is under copyright in your country, do not download or redistribute this work.

To report a copyright violation you can contact us here.

[SBT]

I get your points, I am often guilty of forgetting those of us with small screens.
I've spent some frustrating hours trying to get those dots into tables, but it doesn't seem like it can be done. I ended up sacrificing the dots instead to keep the table as text. I suppose a (complicated) compromise would be to use svg.

I really should get that wiki page on image cleansing ready. A few hints re. Gimp:
* Colors->Levels to adjust black/white cutoff points
* Filters->Enhancement->Unsharp to improve clarity of ink/line drawings. A value of 0.2-0.4 is normally the best.

However, for a bunch of images such as yours, manually correcting each one is a pain, so I do a batch operation with Imagemagick instead:

cd Images
mkdir cleansed
for f in *.png
do
convert $f -level 25%,90% -unsharp 0.3x0.3+3+0 cleansed/$f
done

To find the 25%, 90% cutoff points I inspected a couple of the images in Gimp with Colors->Levels first and looked at the histogram.

You can save a few extra bytes by running the images through the pngcrush utility afterwards:

cd cleansed
mkdir crushed
pngcrush -d crushed *.png

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by mmat1

I guess that depends on your reader. What is it ?

On my PB 622 i can change the font. Exceptions are only the Headlines and the small caps. It was in my intention not to change them together with the rest of the text-body.

Should I issue a version without embedded fonts ?

Almost all my reading is done with a Sony PRS T1. I haven't been able to change fonts in any ebook which has embedded fonts, and I'm surprised that other ereaders can change fonts on ebooks with embedded fonts.

And yes, I'd appreciate a version without an embedded font.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by SBT

I really should get that wiki page on image cleansing ready.

Pretty please? I find that GIMP 2.8 has a nearly vertical learning curve, though I am making very slow progress.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by SBT

I really should get that wiki page on image cleansing ready. A few hints re. Gimp:
* Colors->Levels to adjust black/white cutoff points
* Filters->Enhancement->Unsharp to improve clarity of ink/line drawings. A value of 0.2-0.4 is normally the best.

First of all, convert the image to gray levels (not RGB, and not indexed). Image->Mode->Grayscale.

Add a black layer. Layer->New Layer...->Foreground color (assuming it's black).

Set the black layer mode to "Burn" in the layers dialog. This makes everything in the underlying layer look black, except pure white pixels.

Now select the bottom layer to make changes on it, not on the black layer. Change color levels, remove speckles (with the eraser tool, or painting white on them), etc. Delete (or disable) the black layer before saving.

PS. Having curly quotes and apostrophes would also be nice.

[mmat1]

Originally Posted by SBT

I really should get that wiki page on image cleansing ready.

I'm eager to see it

Changes to version 1.1:
- your pictures are in
- replaced thousands of " and ' (yes, unfortunately Jellby is right with this)
- repalced -- and - -
- removed the borders

The graphical table is still there, and, of couse, the redundant captions.

@Alex: I embedded another stylesheet without fonts, you can change to it just by renaming the stylesheets (I guess ther's no need to explain you how...)

Btw: shall I translate these Phrases:
“Constantinopolitanischerdudelsackspfeifenmachersg esellschafft!”
??

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by mmat1

@Alex: I embedded another stylesheet without fonts, you can change to it just by renaming the stylesheets (I guess ther's no need to explain you how...)

Thanks.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by mmat1

Btw: shall I translate these Phrases:
“Constantinopolitanischerdudelsackspfeifenmachersg esellschafft!”
??

No, but maybe you should use an embedded font (fraktur), like here: