Where do I put the font EULA?

[Tex2002ans]

As a side note, "off-topicness"/discussion like this is great! It may potentially stop others from getting headaches of their own.

Originally Posted by Psymon

[...] and I can't see the point in re-doing it all only to make it all look less nice. :/

Originally Posted by Psymon

So I may as well just stick with what I've got! After all, it works great, looks great, not to mention there was an enormous amount of work/time that went into creating it -- if I was to change the font, I'd pretty much have to start all over, from scratch.

Yes yes, you already sunk in a lot of time/effort into the book, but it is better to sink time/effort and do it right FROM THE BEGINNING.

You have to think of the long-term view of the book. The way that the book is designed is going to cause yourself lots of headaches in the future because you designed it "wrongly" in the first place.

I agree with Jellby, that you should create it with the correct underlying characters, and leave it to the font/software to combine the ligatures.

I am reminded of one book I ran into earlier this year. It was designed in Open Office, had a massive amount of medical terminology, and they decided to not use the actual unicode characters α, β, γ, δ, but overriding normal characters by using a weird font (I forget the specific font used).

Sure, if you read it in Open (or Libre) Office, the document looked fine, if you used Open Office to print to PDF, the document looked fine as PDF... but the underlying text itself was a GIANT mess. When I tried to export to HTML/EPUB, it was a hideous hodge-podge of code + not matching characters.... making it nearly impossible to change into an ebook (I abandoned the project because it would be too much time/effort to convert).

Because of the way the author designed the original document, that book will most likely forever be stuck as a .odt + .pdf.

Imagine in the future, you want to transfer this book to a website (or better yet, imagine the format beyond EPUB/KF8, or future reading devices)..... the way you are designing your book now, you are locking yourself into the very quirks of THAT SPECIFIC FONT (plus all your weird quirks you are coding in for this specific READING PROGRAM (iBooks)).

Your book will last until time immemorial... iPads/iBooks? not so much.

Originally Posted by Psymon

I'm flattered you actually have a folder for me -- don't expect it to get filled up too soon!

Everything I download on a forum is organized into per-user folders. So then at a later date I can reference back to it + give credit where credit is due (if it was some good code, or I learn something from it).

I think it is a pretty good system. And in a few years when I see this user "Psymon" asking us how to convert his "olde" EPUB designed for iBooks into format X, Y, or Z, I will know where to start.

Or if *GASP* MobileRead disappears and I find "Psymon" on another forum complaining, I can do a search for your username and find your "olde" EPUB. Then I can say I told you so.

[Hitch]

AMEN.

That's all I'm going to add. I don't need to hammer Psymon over the head with it, but, suffice it to say, if a client came to me with this, I would not agree to do it, and if an employee of mine tried this, he'd work somewhere else tomorrow.

What's the one cardinal rule here, at our place? You have to ignore what something LOOKS LIKE, and format it based upon WHAT IT IS. Am I saying that we've never, ever, "cheated" and used an empty paragraph? No, of course not.

Someday, this decision will come back to haunt him. I suspect. OTOH, I further suspect that he thinks we're all making a tempest in a teapot. (Right up to the point that Apple changes iBooks again and the book stops working). Oh, well--there's no one here who hasn't learned things the hard way.

Hitch

[Psymon]

Thank you all for your input and advisement, but what you all fail to see and understand -- despite endless, repeated, redundant explanation from me -- is that if I was to listen to you then the whole point of my doing that second half of my book (in the manner I've done it) is gone, right out the window. I might as well just do it as either graphics or PDF (which may well be the solution I do if/when I choose to create another version to sell on other platforms).

And so while I understand what you all are saying, I swear that not a single person here understands what I'm saying, let alone what it is that I'm trying to accomplish. Sure, I wish I could do it "less wrongly", but in order to accomplish that I'll have lost the whole visual aspect of what I'm doing -- and that's the art of it, the whole, entire point of it. You keep insisting that I substitute my current font for another, "correct" font -- but that destroys the entire piece. It's like telling Picasso that his lopsided eyes are "incorrect" and he should do it your way, the "correct" way, so that people in years to come will be able to recognize his pieces as being human beings.

Well, as I already discovered, this method I've done only works in iBooks. And maybe in time to come it won't work in that either. But at least, for a brief moment in time, it was out there, and it worked, and it looked great. You folks are clearly in it for the money, but I'm not -- I learned a long time ago that there's far more important things in life than that.

So damn the torpedos, full steam ahead!

[JSWolf]

But when you do it correctly in ePub for the rest of the world, it will also work in iBooks. So doing it right will make your book saleable more then just the lackluster iBookstore.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But when you do it correctly in ePub for the rest of the world, it will also work in iBooks. So doing it right will make your book saleable more then just the lackluster iBookstore.

I understand that -- I swear, all I do around here is just keep repeating myself, and nobody gets it.

When I say that for me it's the visual, artistic aspect of that particular font, people keep coming at me telling me that the font is "wrong", that the way I'm doing it is "wrong", and that, here, go try this font instead -- despite the fact that using that other font virtually nullifies the entire point of what I'm trying to accomplish here (which clearly nobody gets).

And even when I specifically say -- on multiple occasions -- that "sales" and "making money" aren't the most important thing to me, everyone keeps coming back to me to tell me how lame iBooks is, what a small market they have, and if I would only do things differently I'd have so much more sales and make so much more money.

Money, money, money. Y'all want me to destroy my own art, and sell my own soul, all for money, money, money. You do have a point about getting ebook-making right (and on my next project that won't be an issue at all for me), but you're all completely wrong, you've totally missed the point of LIVING, if you think that getting ebook-making "right" -- that is, putting sales and winning popularity contests above all else -- is more important than getting LIFE right.

Rosebud, folks, rosebud. :/

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Psymon

I understand that -- I swear, all I do around here is just keep repeating myself, and nobody gets it.

When I say that for me it's the visual, artistic aspect of that particular font, people keep coming at me telling me that the font is "wrong", that the way I'm doing it is "wrong", and that, here, go try this font instead -- despite the fact that using that other font virtually nullifies the entire point of what I'm trying to accomplish here (which clearly nobody gets).

And even when I specifically say -- on multiple occasions -- that "sales" and "making money" aren't the most important thing to me, everyone keeps coming back to me to tell me how lame iBooks is, what a small market they have, and if I would only do things differently I'd have so much more sales and make so much more money.

Money, money, money. Y'all want me to destroy my own art, and sell my own soul, all for money, money, money. You do have a point about getting ebook-making right (and on my next project that won't be an issue at all for me), but you're all completely wrong, you've totally missed the point of LIVING, if you think that getting ebook-making "right" -- that is, putting sales and winning popularity contests above all else -- is more important than getting LIFE right.

Rosebud, folks, rosebud. :/

Oh, no, we get it. I know you think that we mere hacks don't get it, but we do. My company's made more than 2,000 books, for everyone from people you've never heard of to publishing superstars to Pulitzer winners, and you think I haven't heard the "artistic vision" speech before? I wish I had $10 for every time I've heard it.

What you don't get is that--aside from me--nobody here is really talking to you about commerciality. If you want to give it away on iBooks, hey, knock yourself out. You're not paying me, so if you go broke chasing your artistic vision, it's no skin off my nose.

The rest of the gang here are about doing books correctly, not so you can make more money--half of the wankers here are socialist dogs or communist pigs (in my humble, but affectionate opinion)--but so that the book can be read more widely. THAT is why they are complaining to you.

Almost everyone here donates time at PG or DP, or here, making books to share the "wealth" of knowledge, or proofreading books for that same purpose, me included. So, the "choir" that you are preaching to here isn't talking to you about MONEY. They are talking to you about the inability of your book to be distributed on other readers. Since, obviously, you're a Jobbleshead (what it looks like is more important than whether or not it really functions), you don't understand that there are millions upon millions of other reading devices--not even counting Amazon--that aren't i-anythings. Your much-loved book won't work on those. Your artistic vision will never been seen on those. So, please stop this silliness about it being some crass attitude about MONEY wreaking havoc with your creation, it's not about MONEY and it never has been.

THAT is what these poor geek bastards have been trying to tell you.

I'm done with this thread and this discussion. I hear enough of this all day long, quite frankly, suffering through it for my pittance; I certainly don't need to "listen" to it or hear it in my downtime. I spent weeks of my life, this past month, trying to explain to someone that "seven spaces, EXACTLY," doesn't exist in an ebook, with proportionally-spaced fonts, to match his "poetry's artistic vision," after months of him telling us we'd made "mistakes" on his manuscript (because, after all, who can understand LINE WRAPPING when a line runs out of space? Why doesn't the text just magi-shrink so the line doesn't break?) so really, enough of that .

Hitch

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Psymon

[...] is that if I was to listen to you then the whole point of my doing that second half of my book (in the manner I've done it) is gone, right out the window. [...] And so while I understand what you all are saying, I swear that not a single person here understands what I'm saying, let alone what it is that I'm trying to accomplish.

We have the same goals:

• Making the book as good as possible.
• Making it available to as many people as possible.
• Making beautiful/high-quality books.
  • Although not sacrificing looks for long-term maintainability.

Originally Posted by Psymon

I might as well just do it as either graphics or PDF (which may well be the solution I do if/when I choose to create another version to sell on other platforms).

Graphics of so many ligatures would be a poor choice (does not scale well, and does not follow user preferences).

With PDF... you cannot sell PDFs at any of the major retailers. You will most likely only be able to sell that PDF directly on your own site. Think iBooks is limited? I believe the market for PDFs such as this (ESPECIALLY a site with little foot-traffic) is miniscule.

Although of course, you would want the PDF available somewhere for its "olde" typographical beauty with that "olde" style background. In this area, PDF is superior to EPUB.

Originally Posted by Psymon

You keep insisting that I substitute my current font for another, "correct" font -- but that destroys the entire piece.

Perhaps email this "JSL Ancient" designer, perhaps if you show him how passionate you are about his great font, he will tweak the font to allow for proper ligature support, instead of the current method of overwriting certain characters.

I mean, there has to be another font designer out there who is out there who is as passionate about unclean "olde" fonts as Psymon. The work is to just find this guy's fonts.

Originally Posted by Psymon

You folks are clearly in it for the money, but I'm not -- I learned a long time ago that there's far more important things in life than that.

I convert books as a hobby, and if I may speak for them, so does Jellby + JSWolf, + Hitch (??? I don't know what she does for fun ) + almost everyone who posts their ebooks on MobileRead.

Since April of this year, I was hired at a non-profit economics organization as an ebook converter, so I work at this stuff full-time (all my waking hours are pretty much working on book conversion). For example, this month I was able to liberate 17 books from dreaded PDF, 10 of which were as a hobby. So I guess I am only 7/17ths "in it for the money".

Edit: Everything I work on is released for free to the world (almost all is public domain and/or CC3.0). Isn't the purpose of writing books to INFLUENCE the world?

Originally Posted by Hitch

[...] RANT [...]

Must have been a tough day at work. Go light a candle, take a nice relaxing bubble bath... and read an e-boo... I mean... just float there and soak in the scent/bubbles.

[Toxaris]

There is not much that I can add what has not already been said. The 'solution' is fairly simple. Use another font or adapt the font to follow normal typesetting rules and put the correct characters in the correct place. That is quite an important point in a font, that characters have their fixed place...
If you don't knowhow, I would recommend to ask the author of the font. This will bite you in the future, potentially even in such a way that you need to redo everything.
Also, this relative small change will allow you to make the book readable on much more readers and potential readers. It is not about the money, it is about sharing knowledge and reading pleasure.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Psymon

And so while I understand what you all are saying, I swear that not a single person here understands what I'm saying, let alone what it is that I'm trying to accomplish.

I completely understand you. You got it looking the way you want, and other ways of getting it are much more work-demanding (like, for instance, creating your own font).

My only point in this discussion was to make you (and others who might read this thread) understand the pros and cons of the approaches, so you can decide whether what you have is really what you want, after all.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I know you think that we mere hacks don't get it, but we do.

I never called you or anyone else names like that, Hitch, or expressed my derision for what you all do here -- please don't put words in my mouth that I never said.

What you don't get is that--aside from me--nobody here is really talking to you about commerciality. If you want to give it away on iBooks, hey, knock yourself out. You're not paying me, so if you go broke chasing your artistic vision, it's no skin off my nose.

So why are you responding to me as though I just took a scrap off of your nose, personally?

the "choir" that you are preaching to here isn't talking to you about MONEY. They are talking to you about the inability of your book to be distributed on other readers. Since, obviously, you're a Jobbleshead (what it looks like is more important than whether or not it really functions), you don't understand that there are millions upon millions of other reading devices--not even counting Amazon--that aren't i-anythings. Your much-loved book won't work on those.

Why do you say I don't understand that, when I'm the one that has repeatedly said that it will only work on iBooks?

Look, it was two decades ago when I first wrote the main text for my book. My first, original intention was to publish it as a hand-bound book (a "regular" paper book), and I even took courses in hand-bookbinding to that end. But then, right at that same time, I got into web design and it became a website -- which it's happily been since 1996.

Only recently (earlier this year), after having acquired an iPad (because my best friend passed away and left it to me -- I probably never would have bought one otherwise), I thought I'd try my hand at making it into an ebook just for the fun of it, and in the process of doing so I discovered that, hey, I can actually do up that second, "olde" half of my book in reflowable text, too! Yippee!

And now, through all these discussions, I've learned that it will only work in iBooks, and there's the potential that in time Apple might change things and eventually it might not work in that either (but only time will tell on that one, of course).

I'm okay with that -- in fact, if you think about that, I've been okay with that since my very first thought of publishing this work popped into my head. As I said, my first idea was to publish it as a hand-bound book, all on my own, in my humble little home, a very small "livre d'artist" edition of, oh, maybe 100 copies or so.

What you and others have been saying to me here, about my ebook, would have been the equivalent of people telling me two decades ago that I was crazy to hand-bind it, that I would reach such a larger audience if, say, I went through Penguin or whatever other "regular" publisher so that I could get a larger distribution for my work -- but doing it that way would have similarly just not been the same thing at all as a hand-bound book.

Your artistic vision will never been seen on those.

Not in the way I'd like it to be seen, the way it looks on iBooks, no. But that doesn't mean that I couldn't eventually come out with another version -- either using graphics or a different font, or whatever other other solution (or dissolution) I might eventually come up with. But if I can do it the way I'd always wanted to on one platform, at least, why not make it as nice as I can for those people?

If I can fulfil my dream on one platform, and if I'm okay with that, why YELL at me and berate me for doing what is actually bringing me fulfilment and happiness?

I'm done with this thread and this discussion. I hear enough of this all day long, quite frankly, suffering through it for my pittance; I certainly don't need to "listen" to it or hear it in my downtime.

I didn't "drag" you in here, Hitch -- you don't have to go storming out in a huff now as though I did, or behave as though I was demanding that you up and change the way that you design ebooks yourself. :/

And hey, it's not like I'm determined to "break all the rules" on any and every future project I might have. Indeed, I have another project lined up to do right after I get this current one up on iBooks, and for that one I'm going to be sure to "do it right" through-and-through, so that I can publish on Kindle and wherever/however else -- I was going to use this other project to learn those other platforms, and whatever "idiosyncrasies" they have, and once I've done that (successfully) I'll be in a better position to go back to this, my first project, and come up with a second version that will work cross-platform.

But for this first time, for my baby, this work that has truly meant so much to me for decades now, I'm going to be like Sinatra and "do it my way." If that's a problem, then that's my problem, right? But if my doing so gets your feathers all ruffled, then that's your problem.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by Jellby

I completely understand you. You got it looking the way you want, and other ways of getting it are much more work-demanding (like, for instance, creating your own font).

My only point in this discussion was to make you (and others who might read this thread) understand the pros and cons of the approaches, so you can decide whether what you have is really what you want, after all.

That's EXACTLY it, Jellby! I genuinely appreciate all the input from all you folks out there, it certainly has made me aware of the issues involved in doing it the way that I am -- and with that knowledge and awareness, yes, this is still what I want to do.

I can always do another version that'll work more cross-platform (down the road, after I've completed my next project), but at least I'll have ALSO fulfilled my dream and been true to my own vision, too, even if it's only for a rather limited audience.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

If you don't knowhow, I would recommend to ask the author of the font. This will bite you in the future, potentially even in such a way that you need to redo everything.

I have, in fact, already written to the creator of that font -- both recently and a couple of times in the more distant past -- and for whatever reason he just doesn't respond. I have no idea why, as he does ask in his font EULA for people to do so, and I do think that he'd be very pleased with what I've already done with it, and what I'm now doing with it.

And as for it biting me in the future, well, as I've already just said in my response to Hitch, and have said all along, I not only have the option to do another version that will work in other platforms, but I intend to create another version to that end.

But as long as I can do the version that I'd always hoped to do, and have it look the way I've always wanted it to look, then I'm going to -- and I just can't imagine why anyone would have any issue with that (all of the above).

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

We have the same goals:

• Making the book as good as possible.
• Making it available to as many people as possible.
• Making beautiful/high-quality books.
  • Although not sacrificing looks for long-term maintainability.

Maybe I should come work for you -- at least, once I know what the hell I'm doing a little better.

Graphics of so many ligatures would be a poor choice (does not scale well, and does not follow user preferences).

I'm not sure what you mean? I just meant to do up each page of that "olde" part of my work as in image -- which, in fact, I've already done, and also in PDF format, too...

http://www.imaginary-friend.ca/epistyll.html

If you scroll down the page, you'll see it as images, and if you scroll further down from that, you can get it as PDF (and at higher resolution).

With PDF... you cannot sell PDFs at any of the major retailers. You will most likely only be able to sell that PDF directly on your own site. Think iBooks is limited? I believe the market for PDFs such as this (ESPECIALLY a site with little foot-traffic) is miniscule.

I asked this elsewhere, somewhere here in these forums, but nobody responded: is there anything wrong with including a PDF within one's epub file? Like, this is just a thought/idea, but in order to make my work more accessible to other platforms, I was thinking that a way that I might do it would be to have a graphic image of the page, and then also provide a link to the PDF version ("built-in" and included within the epub).

Is that "against the rules", to include a PDF within an epub file?

Perhaps email this "JSL Ancient" designer, perhaps if you show him how passionate you are about his great font, he will tweak the font to allow for proper ligature support, instead of the current method of overwriting certain characters.

Yeah, as I already said in another reply this morning, I've written to the guy a couple/few times already, and he just doesn't reply -- go figure. :/

I mean, there has to be another font designer out there who is out there who is as passionate about unclean "olde" fonts as Psymon. The work is to just find this guy's fonts.

As I've said before, I've looked for YEARS (if not decades), and I don't know of any others! Not free and embeddable, anyway, but even "paid" and not-embeddable there's probably only a couple. :/

I convert books as a hobby, and if I may speak for them, so does Jellby + JSWolf, + Hitch (??? I don't know what she does for fun ) + almost everyone who posts their ebooks on MobileRead.

Very cool.

And hey, if I did step on anyone's toes or offend anyone with my "money, money, money" comment, I do apologize. I used to do freelance web design, and I got pretty sick of that kind of single-minded perspective of my clients, and perhaps that sorry experience left me a little presumptuous and jaded. D'oh... :/

[mrmikel]

PDFs can not be included within a epub file and work. Not on most readers anyway. You would have to have it as a separate file. You would have to be careful of your storage location, so your link to it from within the epub would work. Not all readers can link to the internet, and some people turn off the wi-fi, etc to save power.

Most of us have pounded away for quite a while on epubs. Your approach is fine for a one off if you don't really care if it survives the endless and inevitable hardware changes at Apple and elsewhere.

As I understand it, everyone is showing their concern based on the very bitter fact that if you do things I we understand you to be doing, you will end up having to do it all over from scratch. Most of us when we are done with a book are good and done with it for quite a while and could recite the book almost from memory for reading it over and over and over again for errors, obliterating most of the enjoying of it reading it in the first place. If any reader of your book finds an error, it may take you an inordinate amount of time to fix it. That is the concern.

Harry, a very meticulous fella, posts beautiful epubs on here. But even he is on 4th or 5th revisions of the same book.

Reminds me a bit of what I heard many years ago, "You can always do anything you want....so long as you don't care about the cost or the consequences."

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Psymon

Maybe I should come work for you -- at least, once I know what the hell I'm doing a little better.

Nah, I don't accept people who use fonts with non-standard character positions.

Most of my work is working from PDF scans of old books/articles -> OCR (Optical Character Recognition) -> EPUB -> Running through rounds of tests to wittle down errors and normalize the code.

Originally Posted by Psymon

I'm not sure what you mean? I just meant to do up each page of that "olde" part of my work as in image -- which, in fact, I've already done, and also in PDF format, too...

http://www.imaginary-friend.ca/epistyll.html

If you scroll down the page, you'll see it as images, and if you scroll further down from that, you can get it as PDF (and at higher resolution).

Ahhh, I see. I was thinking ligatures -> images -> shrink/expand along with the digital text. Sort of like what I recommended in post #16 in this topic (that topic also brings up using SVG for the same purpose):

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=222825

If you are going entire pages as images, then I would recommend regenerating those images of the pages at much higher resolution, so that they are actually readable.

Originally Posted by Psymon

Is that "against the rules", to include a PDF within an epub file?

As mrmikel said, it is "against the rules", there are some non-standard ways of doing it.... and I would not go down that route AT ALL. Any method of including it inside of the EPUB I guarantee will get broken.

Originally Posted by Psymon

As I've said before, I've looked for YEARS (if not decades), and I don't know of any others! Not free and embeddable, anyway, but even "paid" and not-embeddable there's probably only a couple. :/

Well that is the good thing about the "hive-mind" of a large forum such as this. The internet is a huge place, and others will know things that you don't.

Originally Posted by Psymon

Very cool.

And hey, if I did step on anyone's toes or offend anyone with my "money, money, money" comment, I do apologize. I used to do freelance web design, and I got pretty sick of that kind of single-minded perspective of my clients, and perhaps that sorry experience left me a little presumptuous and jaded. D'oh... :/

All is forgiven (at least on my end). I know that it hurts when people tell you something that is so near and dear to you was done wrong and should be fixed (I am a programmer). All the more reason to try to do it right in the first place!

Code will always need to be maintained, so while you are coding, you try to take steps while initially making the program to make it easier to go back at a future point and update/fix/expand sections.

This is one of the reasons why I initially got into EPUBs. The economics site releases every single book for free as PDF (also release all speeches/lectures/videos for free... FREE, FREE, FREE (not "money, money, money" )). Then they started releasing EPUBs of the entire catalog. My entire life/worldview was changed from these free books (the books, and the Institute are now very near and dear to me).

When I took apart the EPUBs, to my horror, I noticed ugly, unmaintainable spaghetti code! I would try to tweak one thing in the CSS (example, fixing font-size in one class), and unexpected things would change (sections I expected to be completely unrelated would become HUGE/tiny). The way the whole document was coded just made it an overall nightmare to tweak.

Yes, it looks great if you are reading it on the PC, and it works fine if you read it at default font-size, and it looks pretty good on the device........... BUT, the code is a giant mess, and if/when the new formats come out, these EPUBs will be a big pain to fix/update. I can guarantee you something will break and not transfer as expected, it would be a pain to fix that code. Not to mention the converted code itself would be a huge bloated mess.

In my case, I "normalize" all of the CSS throughout our entire catalog of EPUBs (I use the same exact CSS, with only minor tweaks per book). I keep the code extremely minimal (which means less breakage across devices + less chance of anything breaking in future formats). This makes it easy as pie to go in and do any tweaks.

I also try to more closely maintain the "spirit" of the original book.

Here is an example of a recent one I redid last month.

Image of Original PDF + Old EPUB + New EPUB:



Here is Old + New in ADE:



When I redid this, we also decided to toss in higher resolution photographs of the authors:



I have attached the Before/After EPUBs. (Although this old EPUB wasn't that bad... I have some spaghetti code HORRORS if you really want to see them).

I get paid every so often to go back and touch up old EPUBs (if we need to fix up typos, add a Preface, add a new cover, etc.).

While I am at it, I just bring it up to the standards of all the other EPUBs I have been creating. Doing it this way is much better for the long-term of the book, which means YEARS from now, we can easily transfer the books from EPUB -> future format. As I said before, these books/ideas will last until time immemorial. A specific implementation in iBooks will not.

Originally Posted by mrmikel

As I understand it, everyone is showing their concern based on the very bitter fact that if you do things we understand you to be doing, you will end up having to do it all over from scratch.

Thank you for that, that is exactly the type of eloquent wording I wish I used.