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View Poll Results: Does the community have use for another ebook formatting program?
Yes!!! There are no current tools that work! 16 25.00%
Yes, variety is good. 27 42.19%
Maybe, depends on what you have in mind 16 25.00%
No, we have everything we need, and more is just confusing/wastful. 3 4.69%
What the heck are ebook formating programs? 2 3.13%
Voters: 64. You may not vote on this poll

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Old 03-15-2008, 04:41 PM   #106
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aappezzuto, actually, it's quite easy to make different appearance selections in LaTeX --- look up Peter Wilson's memoir documentclass for a very nice implementation w/ an excellent manual (ob. discl. I made some suggestions to it which were accepted). See also the TeX Showcase http://www.tug.org/texshowcase for examples of the variety of document which can be done w/ LaTeX

bsandersen, my big complaint w/ groff, troff, lout &c. is that one is giving up significant flexibility in comparison to what TeX can achieve.

ath, the problem is it's not just a matter of marking h&j points, but of choosing good line breaks, and h&j is sometimes dependent on which part of speech a word is used for, so unless one is going to mark up every sentence for object, verb, direct object &c. it's not going to be possible to mark things up compleatly.

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Old 03-16-2008, 02:51 AM   #107
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ath, the problem is it's not just a matter of marking h&j points, but of choosing good line breaks, and h&j is sometimes dependent on which part of speech a word is used for, so unless one is going to mark up every sentence for object, verb, direct object &c. it's not going to be possible to mark things up compleatly.
So ... give me the tools that support that job. Give me a tool that provides for house-dependent hyphenation, adds discretionary hyphens where it can, flags ambiguous words for manual decisions, and leave those to me.

I'm not saying (even if you may be assuming so) that everything must be automatic. I'm saying that a good e-book formatting tool should be based on some kind of idea of what a good e-book is, finding out where the pain in that work really is, and relieve it. Producing well hyphenated lines in a e-book is such a pain.

So perhaps I should change my advise: go talk to a e-book designer, someone who does this for a living. Ask what kind of tool he or she would like.
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Old 03-16-2008, 08:21 PM   #108
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So perhaps I should change my advise: go talk to a e-book designer, someone who does this for a living. Ask what kind of tool he or she would like.
part of what I love about this community is that, though not many of these people do this for a "living", plenty of them do this to make life livable There are only 3 or 4 groups online that are even in the same class as MobileRead, and none of them that I have seen have experienced the huge growth or interest in book formating that this one has.

kovidgoyal has all ready pointed out that his tool has most if not all the functionality that I am setting out build. I will go so far to say that he has built something that is technically much more sophisticatedly than anything I even want to put together. Honestly, I want to take a bit of the functionality and control away from the user, and give them back something that is easier to use than a flashlight (ok I dont want to go quite that far...) I want to be able to send this to the average 8 year old, along with a decently spell checked work from xyz giant collection, and get back a predictably decent and readable book, in ANY format that I want.

So to take this to a power tools analogy, its rely about what sharp bits to sharpen, what corner to round, and what features MUST be present to get the best results. If anyone remembers the original ms pictureit... thats sort of what I'm looking for in this. It was like a super guided version of photoshop, with some of the sharp bits well hidden, if not rounded off all together.

For some of the people here, they will use what they all ready have... some will blend this tool into the mix, and some may change over... What I hope is that it will attract new people in, and make the quality and quantity of the average ebook contribution increase dramatically.
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Old 03-16-2008, 09:06 PM   #109
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A basic list of features that would yield a useful tool (IMO) as a first stage would be simply:

- Inline markup (bold, italic etc)
- Ability to select block and apply sematic information to them. (This is a heading, this is a sub heading, this is a chapter, etc
- Links
- Tables
- Spell check
- Input from HTML
- Output to HTML

I make this list assuming you want to build a tool that is useful for the ebook hobbyist/conversion enthusiast and not as a professional publication software alternative.
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Old 03-17-2008, 02:37 AM   #110
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Allow me to add to kovidgoyal list. Book Designer is a pretty good program. If you want to top it, do one thing: Design a good GUI. Download Book Designer, play with it, and see what not to do.
If you're using QT it should be pretty easy to build a good GUI (I think it's the best GUI platform out there, in terms of capabilty, easy of use, documentation and more). So please, apart from all the other programming aspects, plan the GUI in depth.
That's my 2c.
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Old 03-17-2008, 04:37 AM   #111
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ath, one could quite easily make an xml schema which would support tagging for parts of speech --- the problem is the effort of applying all those tags to a document of any length compleatly and accurately. It's quite enough work just looking through a document finding the small percentage of instances where things have been gotten wrong and applying a fix.

Probably a better choice here is to forego hyphenation entirely and set everything FLRR (flush left, ragged right) --- certainly Sony's ebook viewing program wouldn't have some of the spacing issues which really irk me if it set things fully justified (FLFR).

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Old 03-17-2008, 09:13 AM   #112
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Better embedded font support for LRF.Not just embed this font and use it for the entire body. But the ability to select specific text and tell the program that is the font I want to use. Support for tables, Left/right justification, inline graphics, graphics not just centered, header/footer support with the ability to chnage what is displayed and the style. Proper ToC that doesn't have these underlines that don't look all that wonderful. Get rid is the forced author and forced title stuff that Book Designer forces on us.
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Old 03-17-2008, 07:47 PM   #113
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I've thought about this some more, and here's how I would do it:

Make the ebook format some lightweight markup language, for e.g., markdown (see the thread on txt2lrf for examples of markdown in action)

python-markdown has a plugin system that will allow you to easily write plugins to support any custom ebook features you need. It will mean that you can write a simple Text Editor with syntax highlighting and a preview button (WYSIWYM + automatic partial WYSIWYG). I believe, you can accommodate all the needs of the typical ebook author using markdown. There are plenty of existing tools to convert markdown to HTML in many languages.

It's light, simple, easy to learn and easy to program. It leverages existing code. The hardest coding would be in writing input filters for various existing ebook formats. A lot of authors who also write on the web would be familiar with lightweight markup languages already.
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Old 03-18-2008, 02:41 AM   #114
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Probably a better choice here is to forego hyphenation entirely and set everything FLRR (flush left, ragged right) --- certainly Sony's ebook viewing program wouldn't have some of the spacing issues which really irk me if it set things fully justified (FLFR).
... but of course excessive raggedness is equally disturbing: a long line followed by a short one is every bit as bad as one with excessive internal spacing. Some balancing will be necessary. And there are quite a number of book designers who is not going to think 'ragged right' is anywhere close an acceptable solution.

Why not just bite the bullet, and accept that there are some difficult problems to solve in order to produce a good eBook. Hyphenation is one of them. It's not going to go away. A *good* eBook tool should really address the problem, and so of course such a solution will necessarily be on a wishlist for one. Not everything on a wishlist will be implemented, but at least it serves as a feature catalogue for the future.

Full XML-markup is a 'batch programmer's solution', correct as far as it goes, but economically impractical. No typesetter ever did anything like that -- they concentrated on visibly loose pages, and widows/orphans, and adjusted accordingly, worrying about 'full markup' only for those sentences that were candidates for end-of-line hyphenation points.

Without the help of a fixed page format, that isn't possible: all acceptable hyphenation points (and as I said, this depends on language: AmE and BrE do not have the same rules) must be applied, some must be inserted or inhibited on a house style basis, and some must be handled manually.

What the book formatter needs is the support for his job. That includes the choice of deciding himself whether to do ragged or flush setting, as well as the tools for doing either up the standards of his profession. As I said: support every feature of the *reader*software*. If it does both flush and ragged setting, the book tool should support both features. If flush gets ugly because the book formatter has to insert hyphenation points manually, then he's not using a supporting tool, but merely an enabling tool. And we have quite enough of those.

I repeat: *support* every feature of the reading software. Not just enable them, and leave the book format person to sort out the mess as best as he can.

There, I've said my part.
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Old 03-18-2008, 07:45 AM   #115
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Is there a comparison chart of text presentation / formatting features supported by the various ebook viewing programs on the hardware readers?

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