Historical Fiction Twain, Mark: The Prince and the Pauper. (Illustrated) v6 15 May 2011

[Jellby]

Mark Twain (real name Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910) is probably one of the most known American writers. He was immensely popular in his time, especially noted for his wit and humour, and he is still widely quoted nowadays.

"The Prince and the Pauper" was first published in 1881 in Canada before its 1882 publication in the United States. In the last days of Henry VIII, the heir to the throne (future Edward VI) meets a poor boy who resembles him strikingly. As an entertainment they switch clothes... and then confusion arises. The pauper is taken as Prince, and the Prince is taken as pauper. Most of the book tells the "adventures" of the Prince among commong people, who treat him as the lowest member of society. Apart from the story, the book tries to depict ambience, customs, laws, etc. of 16th century England.

There are almost 200 illustrations by Frank T. Merrill, John J. Harley and L. S. Ipsen, which accounts for the large filesize.

The source of the text is PG, but the illustrations are re-extracted from the scans available at the Internet Archive, and they are cleaned up and enhanced; if I may say it myself, I think they look much better now. The text is proofread and corrected in some places, there is a TOC, a list of illustrations, hyperlinked notes, etc.

This is my first try with an illustrated ePUB. [s]In the list of illustrations I've included all the illustrations themselves[/s], each of them with a link to the place where the illustration appears in the text. This book would be best read in a system supporting the "page-break-after" and "page-break-before" attributes (there are page breaks in the frontmatter, after each chapter title illustration and in the notes), does such a system exist?

For those wanting to read this in a web browser, I upload an index.zip file: just unzip this and the .epub file in the same directory, and open index.html (and modify index.css if you like).

All feedback is welcome.

EDIT (v2): Two required elements were missing from the .ncx file.

EDIT (v3): Modified the drop caps code to make it work with Adobe Digital Editions (and the Sony reader).

EDIT (v4): Added embedded fonts for titles and drop caps. I hope it works!

EDIT (v5): Updated to support the epub2pdf script.

EDIT (v5.1): Fixed illustrator's metadata.

EDIT (v6): Some small improvements in formatting.

(previous dowload count: 1544)

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[brewt]

Not bad - how did you build it?

-bjc

This work is assumed to be in the Life+70 public domain OR the copyright holder has given specific permission for distribution. Copyright laws differ throughout the world, and it may still be under copyright in some countries. Before downloading, please 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.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by brewt

Not bad - how did you build it?

Hand-coded XHTML, OPF and NCX, zipped with:

#!/bin/bash
FILE="The Prince and the Pauper.epub"
rm -f "$FILE"
zip -X0 "$FILE" mimetype
zip -X9Dr "$FILE" META-INF OEBPS

[Jellby]

After the discussion in this thread, I modified the drop caps code to make it work with Adobe Digital Editions (and the Sony reader). Uploaded v3.

[Jellby]

I thought this was a good opportunity to try embedded fonts. They are used for the titles and drop caps, and I think they fit quite nicely. It's easy to disable them, just comment out the @import in the style.css file (you have to unpack and repack the epub).

[paulgodard]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Hand-coded XHTML, OPF and NCX, zipped with:

#!/bin/bash
FILE="The Prince and the Pauper.epub"
rm -f "$FILE"
zip -X0 "$FILE" mimetype
zip -X9Dr "$FILE" META-INF OEBPS

Hi Jellby

Does this code works on Mac OS-X? I have read that the sequence in which the files are zipped is important.

I am also looking at automating the coding of the HTML, OPF and NCX files with php and mysql because my book has a very repetitive structure.

Paul

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by paulgodard

Does this code works on Mac OS-X? I have read that the sequence in which the files are zipped is important.

I don't see why it shouldn't, provided the zip command accepts the same flags (being a unix-like OS, it most probably does). The important part is putting "mimetype" first, with no compression.

I am also looking at automating the coding of the HTML, OPF and NCX files with php and mysql because my book has a very repetitive structure.

For more technical discussion, suggestions and advice, please visit the ePUB forum.

[neilmarr]

Many thanks for the hard work, Jelby. Just downloaded the book in ePub to Calibre. Looking forward to the read. Very best. Neil

[snarkophilus]

Hi Jellby,

I have a Sony 350 reader, and I'm seeing the text in the <div class="header"> sections showing up on the screen on a line before the drop cap and the first paragraph in each chapter and section (contents, list of illustrations, notes, etc). I can take a picture if that would help describe the problem any better.

I'm reasonably new to this ebook css stuff. What is the purpose of those <div class="header"> sections? It seems to duplicate the h1 info without being referenced anywhere.

Cheers,
Simon.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by snarkophilus

I have a Sony 350 reader, and I'm seeing the text in the <div class="header"> sections showing up on the screen

Yes, that's a "bug" in the Adobe engine that the Sony uses. The <div class="header"> uses "display: oeb-page-head" in the CSS, which compliant ePUB readers should not include in the normal text flow. The intent is to have that text as a header on every page, although I know of no reader that supports it, but they should at least not display the text in the page.

In other books I've used some trick to work around this Adobe problem, but I havent updated this book (yet). If it bothers you, you can edit the style.css file and replace "oeb-page-head" with "none".

[snarkophilus]

Thanks for the explanation. The rest of the book looks so good visually I'll tweak my local copy.

Cheers,
Simon.

[snarkophilus]

Hi Jellby,

I read this book because of the recommendations in some of the technical sections of this forum about nice formatting. Well, to be honest, I was planning to look at a paragraph or three and not much more to check out the formatting. I haven't been a fan of the "classics" (too many scarred memories from high school) but did enjoy Zelda's epub of Three Men In A Boat. Well, I'm happy to say the first chapter hooked me in, and I surprised myself and totally enjoyed the book! The images looked superb and layout and formatting surpasses all of the commercial ebooks I've purchased.

I did make some scribbles as I went, and your opening post says all feedback is welcome, so goes with some more:

1. The "Back" link for notes points to the start of a paragraph. On long paragraphs this means you can jump back a page when you return from the note. Is it possible to have the "Back" link point to the footnote marker itself? I can see the id=".." in the opening <p ...> tag so I don't know if it's possible to do this.
2. The footnote labels are a bit hard to hit on my PRS-350. It's impossible to use a finger and I need to pull the stylus out to hit the footnote marker. A larger marker would probably not look as good though...
3. Is the formatting of the "In the name of King!" with the blank line either side just before the middle of chapter 5 deliberate? It doesn't seem to match the rest of the book.
4. In chapter 9 in the paragraph containing "They were dressed in striped hose ..." and a few of the paragraphs following there are quotes around non-spoken text. Are they meant to be there? I've still got the scribbles if you want a list of them.
5. The headers for notes 13, 19, 20 and 22 where the header has a break has a text indent on the second line of the header so that the first line is centered nicely but the second line is offset to the right. The CSS doesn't seem to do this as far as I can tell.

I hope you don't take any of these negatives - they were only minor niggles and didn't take anything away at all from my enjoyment of the book.

Cheers,
Simon.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by snarkophilus

I did make some scribbles as I went, and your opening post says all feedback is welcome, so goes with some more:

I'm glad you enjoyed the book. It's always nice to have some feedback, it's even greater when I get a report of things that might be improved in the book!

The "Back" link for notes points to the start of a paragraph. On long paragraphs this means you can jump back a page when you return from the note. Is it possible to have the "Back" link point to the footnote marker itself? I can see the id=".." in the opening <p ...> tag so I don't know if it's possible to do this.

That is, in principle intentional. I didn't want to have the backlinks point to the footnote marker, but rather to the word, sentence or passage the footnote refers to, so that one does not need to page back to get the context. But I was a bit lazy, and instead of looking for a good place to anchor each footnote, I decided to link them at the start of the paragraph instead. I'll consider changing this, though. Technically, there's nothing preventing the backlink to point anywhere. (Anyway, it's always better to use the "back" function of your reader, if it has one.)

The footnote labels are a bit hard to hit on my PRS-350. It's impossible to use a finger and I need to pull the stylus out to hit the footnote marker. A larger marker would probably not look as good though...

Hmm... can't you activate the links without using the touchscreen? That's where keyboard/keypad navigation comes useful

Is the formatting of the "In the name of King!" with the blank line either side just before the middle of chapter 5 deliberate? It doesn't seem to match the rest of the book.

Yes, it is (see here). Actually, it should be in smallcaps, but the Adobe engine (used by Sony among others) does not display smallcaps.

In chapter 9 in the paragraph containing "They were dressed in striped hose ..." and a few of the paragraphs following there are quotes around non-spoken text. Are they meant to be there? I've still got the scribbles if you want a list of them.

The quote marks are there in all printed editions I can see. I guess those are quotes from somewhere else (real or fictional), although not explicitly stated.

The headers for notes 13, 19, 20 and 22 where the header has a break has a text indent on the second line of the header so that the first line is centered nicely but the second line is offset to the right. The CSS doesn't seem to do this as far as I can tell.

That's a bug in Adobe again (see #3 here). I'll try to work around it as suggested in post #12.

Stay tuned, I'll probably upload a new version this weekend

[snarkophilus]

Originally Posted by Jellby

That is, in principle intentional. I didn't want to have the backlinks point to the footnote marker, but rather to the word, sentence or passage the footnote refers to, so that one does not need to page back to get the context. But I was a bit lazy, and instead of looking for a good place to anchor each footnote, I decided to link them at the start of the paragraph instead. I'll consider changing this, though. Technically, there's nothing preventing the backlink to point anywhere. (Anyway, it's always better to use the "back" function of your reader, if it has one.)

There is a "back" function on the 350, but it's "Press the options hard key", "tap Goto", "tap Previous View" which is so much more effort than just tapping the "Back" link on the page

Hmm... can't you activate the links without using the touchscreen? That's where keyboard/keypad navigation comes useful

No keyboard/keypad on the 350. Just a small row of five hard buttons - page back, page forward, home, zoom and options. If there's a way of selecting links with those I haven't discovered it yet.

That's a bug in Adobe again (see #3 here). I'll try to work around it as suggested in post #12.

That &nbsp; workaround does indeed fix the centering on my 350.

Good to know that of my "issues", some were Adobe bugs, some weren't even issues and the others (to do with links) are more user interface issues on the Sony than anything else. As I mentioned originally, none of these are really more than minor annoyances and didn't detract from the reading experience at all.

Cheers,
Simon.

[Jellby]

Improved anchor placement for footnotes, page margins, header centering, and maybe something else. Uploaded v6.