Keep reading settings for all books

[kguil]

@Montana Harper - I think that the next update (2.1.5) will address your issues.

[Faterson]

Montana Harper, I believe you that abnormal situations can produce unexpected results. A normal reader does not read a new "book" every 5 to 15 minutes. Short stories are typically collected in anthologies, instead of publishing every story, even one of only 500 words, as a separate "book". This just does not apply to 99.9999% of readers out there.

That said, I agree Marvin might handle such abnormal situations better. Let's see what Kris will come up with. As you say, if the EPUB code does not specify any font size, that font size should be sticky from book to book in Marvin. For me, it certainly appears to be sticky -- but I don't read a new "book" every 10 to 15 minutes.

[Montana Harper]

Originally Posted by kguil

@Montana Harper - I think that the next update (2.1.5) will address your issues.

Thanks much, Kris. I appreciate that you pay attention to the forums and take into consideration the things that your users say; that puts you above 99% of app developers.

[kguil]

You're very welcome. I'm glad to help.

[Wyndham]

Originally Posted by Faterson

I just don't get why it should be so important for Marvin to immediately show the ideal font size (when every reader believes something else to be ideal!) upon the first opening of a book. I mean, why do we have all the fantastic formatting buttons in Marvin? Anyone can just push a few buttons, and there it is -- the ideal layout, and it remains sticky.

As to "MS Word styles", they are notorious for being a disaster. MS Word may be the world champion in producing inefficient, bloated code. I would not be surprised if any EPUB created in Word, out of all software packages, would fail to display as expected; I would be surprised if it did.

Does your code get validated in the w3c.org validator, Wyndham? In the EPUBs I create, I avoid anything but absolutely necessary code, so any MS Word styles are out of the question. I especially avoid specifying any font sizes, other than relative ones for (mostly) headings, and so, the e-books then look very nice in Marvin not just to me, but to any reader whose reading preferences may be very different from mine.

Specifying font sizes (other than relative ones) should not be a matter for the e-book code to handle -- it should be left up to the e-book reader (such as Marvin) to handle, and Marvin handles it beautifully.

Why do you have to be so offensive? I was trying to be helpful by reporting problems and supplying some information to hopefully help solve the problem. I am thinking I may avoid these discussions altogether is this is going to be the response.

I have never asked for the ideal font size, so to put that in your reply is making something up and quite frankly missing the point.

Until the most recent update, the fonts WERE NOT STICKY. If they were, then Kris would not have made an update and then stated this was one of the changes in the update.

MS Word Styles are excellent for formatting a Word document and should be the ONLY way a Word document is formatted. I did not say anything about generating an html file with Word, which does generate desperately bad html code. As bad as this code is, it becomes infinitely worse if a mixture of formatting is used rather than just Styles.

I use LibreOffice to generate an html file (from the MS Word document) and then use Notepad to remove unwanted code, leaving a clean html file which is then imported into Calibre. I have validated the code, although I don't do so every time.

I have not yet tried the new option in Calibre to generate ePubs directly from MS Word documents, so can't comment on how successful that would be.

All of this however is getting off the point, which was that the ePubs I generate have consistent formatting and I would prefer them to look the same in my eBook reader. Marvin was not doing this, but it now is since the latest update. The font sizes are now sticky, which they were not before.

[Faterson]

The font sizes have always seemed sticky in my ebooks in Marvin, so let's not over-generalise. And please spare me the "offensive" stuff.

[slayda]

I also have not been blessed with "sticky" font sizes in Marvin. And yes I can change the font size to something near to what I consider optimal. However unlike the color themes, the font sizes don't have names or even numbers like word processors & spread sheets do so my changes are only approximately optimal.

For my personal use both the font size and the color schemes would be better if I had numerical control, eg. Point size on fonts, RGB values on colors. Apparently at least one other user has similar feelings.

Al that said, Kris, Marvin is a wonder of programming. I's done enough coding in my past to recognize that.

[Faterson]

I agree with the numeric values. That's another thing I like about Moon+ Reader Pro on Android: it is similarly customisable to Marvin (in some respects, even more customisable -- in others, less), but what Moon+ does is that it always pops up a numeric value whenever you customize anything there. Are you reducing page margins? Moon+ pops up some numbers there. Are you enlarging/shrinking font sizes? Moon+ pops up a number for you.

I would appreciate such clarity in Marvin, too. Because although customisation in Marvin works without a hitch, it's a "blind" or "vague" experience: you do get the result you want to see, but you don't know how you get there; you simply need to keep pressing buttons on a trial-and-error basis, until you see the exact formatting you prefer. There's no easy way to remember, or replicate in another book (or on another device running Marvin!), just what it is that you've managed to set up.

It's not like Marvin isn't similarly clear in other respects: one of the great features in Marvin is that when you reduce/increase brightness by sliding your finger up or down, you get to see the exact numeric percentage of the current screen brightness. I find that extremely useful in Marvin. (I have seen many other e-readers that allow you to control screen brightness in this way, without popping up the numerically exact percentage indicator.)

[kguil]

I like the idea of showing the numeric values when changing settings. I have a look at what it will take.

[At_Libitum]

Originally Posted by Faterson

Montana Harper, I believe you that abnormal situations can produce unexpected results. A normal reader does not read a new "book" every 5 to 15 minutes.

Whoaa there,....I'd prefer it if you would 'mitigate' before assuming. It's that I've gotten accustomed to your way of putting things sometimes but otherwise I would feel a tad toe-stepped for being assumed to be 'abnormal'

If I can avoid it I never read anthologies. Besides that, I am a heavy FeedBooks reader, and most all of the short stories are published there as separate downloads. It's only in rare cases that I download an anthology. The exceptions being mostly if it is a collection from the same author and preferably dealing with the same main characters. e.g. Max Carrados, Sherlock Holmes.

And another thing, in all that time I've been downloading heaps of short stories from FeedBooks, and other sources, I have not once ever needed to change the font settings on Stanza because of the way a book was put together. In that respect, Stanza is truly a 'set once and never look back' e-Reader


PS. On a sidenote, stop knocking MS Word. It may have a bad rep about all of the junk code it puts in HTML but that is mostly because folks don't know what to use else for HTML (not everyone codes in notepad) Plus that you have an option in MS Word to save html files in a clean format with most all of the 'junk' filtered out, the only bothersome thing that it still maintains is assigning the base font inline to every paragraph, sentence and headers used in your document if you use multiple font faces. To see how well such files get converted to ePub just take a look at the example that the Calibre author put together. Heck, in most cases it comes out even better than some of the 'books' you can download from Project Gutenberg

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by At_Libitum

I would feel a tad toe-stepped for being assumed to be 'abnormal'

So would I, but you have misread the statement. It's a common fallacy in online discussions to confuse a statement like "That's silly," with the statement "You're silly." The former statement is 100% legitimate, because ad rem; and the latter is 100% unacceptable, because ad hominem.

You're saying that publishing short stories as separate books seems normal to you. I accept your viewpoint. I hope you also accept my viewpoint that I find such a practice to be non-standard, in the world of literature.

If you don't think it's non-standard, please enter any real-life bookstore and try to find a handful of short stories published as separate books. I dare say you will find few or none.

Perhaps modern-day servers like FeedBooks specialise in the non-standard -- publishing literature as files, not books -- but that by itself does not make the practice "normal" in my eyes.

Originally Posted by At_Libitum

Stanza is truly a 'set once and never look back' e-Reader

Not true at all. I had to keep readjusting the font sizes in Stanza all the time. Unlike Marvin, Stanza did not keep the font sizes sticky for each particular book. You happen to have been fortunate with your font sizes in Stanza; others have not been as fortunate.

And yes, MS Word produces junk code, in the supposedly "simplified" HTML version, too. (By the way, that version seems to have markedly deteriorated in, say, Word 2007, compared to earlier Word versions.) The only code acceptable to me is one validated by w3c.org's validator. If I need to clean it up manually once MS Word is finished, that means the code was at least partly junk.

From among WYSIWYG HTML editors, I would recommend Composer, part of SeaMonkey's (ex-Mozilla, ex-Netscape) suite; it produces surprisingly valid code.

[At_Libitum]

Accepted.

I was more meaning that I find it normal to have short stories as a collection of separate files rather than 'bundled'. At least when it comes to the digital counterpart. I don't think you can compare a digital publication format with how the printed version is usually published for the same reasons as are often raised when you see someone suggesting to have their eReader 'turn' pages as if it were a physical book. Mostly these requests get 'politely' answered with the argument that they should not expect a digital medium to behave like a paper one. Granted, here too there is the matter of personal preference but still, eBooks are then also not considered the same as a regular printed version.

So just because it is fairly customary for short stories to be bundled in an anthology when published out of the context they first appeared in in printed format, it seems to be just as customary for sites as FeedBooks, Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, etc to provide them as separately downloadable ebooks when dealing with the digital format. They do provide anthologies but then only when originally published as anthology, I've not known these sites to actively bundle short stories themselves. Most of these stories seem to be sourced from the weekly/monthly magazines where they originally appeared in, so perhaps that is why they probably get separated out into individual downloadable ebooks.

[Faterson]

Just some musing below...

It is true that times, they are a-changing. What may seem non-standard today, may become standard tomorrow.

It raises the question of the entire terminology used by e-book readers. If you look at Marvin, it uses "books" as its basic units. The top item in Marvin's Library organiser is "All my books" (not "All my files"). And no matter how hard I try, I just can't look at a bunch of short stories, and call them "books". It's an awful misnomer, isn't it? They are [EPUB] files, each containing a story. That's it.

Kindle goes to the opposite extreme, in that if you side-load a non-Amazon book into the Kindle app, it will insist on calling it a document, not a book.

As to why I prefer to read anthologies: years fly by like crazy. Even if I lived to be 120 years old, I won't have the time to read all the fine anthologies ever published. So, why should I waste any time on reading isolated short stories? There's no time to lose... let's get on with all the fine collections/anthologies.

By the way, that's a crucial distinction, to me: collections and anthologies. Collections can frequently contain stories by the same writer, while anthologies typically contain stories by different writers. I prefer the latter, because it provides for much needed variety in my reading. Not too much variety, though -- I limit myself to no more than 3 stories by 3 different writers in a day.

The role of the editor (compiler) of an anthology is crucial. If he/she is a person of taste, then reading such an anthology is unmitigated joy, story after story. But if an anthology is only compiled mechanically: "let's include 3 stories from each year/genre/country/writer here, just so that everyone is proportionately represented, regardless of the stories' quality"... then reading such anthologies can be a pain, and selecting individual stories from a site like FeedBooks might indeed be preferable.

[DaleDe]

Perhaps ebooklets could be used for small eBooks.

Dale

[Faterson]

That's a nice term.