Casanova, The Complete Memoirs - Comments, please!

[ahi]

Note: Updated with a different font, and edition information on title page.

Note 2: Added (zipped) plaintext file from which the LaTeX source was created--with quotation marks, and some other things auto-fixed up with varying degree of success. Use it for making an ePub, Mobi, LRF, et cetera if you wish.

Greetings,

After a far too long day of typesetting, and some LaTeX confusion, please find attached The Complete Memoirs of Casanova.

This is the full edition as sourced from PG, but with the occasional liberal alteration of form (not content) to accommodate for the fact that either the transcription efforts or the books themselves were atrocious.

Quotes are fixed. Most letters, poems, quotes, and songs are properly typeset. The far too many levels of the complete book are all sensibly treated and correctly linked from both the internal and external table of contents.

And all in a 6" screen optimized 5245 page PDF.

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It is, unfortunately, not perfect. Given the length of the book, I am sure I have overlooked many things... although I think oversights are less likely to be utterly blatant things, and more likely to be inconsistencies with regards to the separating of letters and quotes from the text. (There are far too many quotes, poems, songs, and letters and too few were properly [formatting-wise] highlighted as such in the source text, but since it is not always obvious what is a full note/letter and what is an excerpt, I sometimes had to make haughty decisions that I might see wise overturn once I have fully read the book.)

If you are interested, please download it, read it, and provide feedback/comments regarding how you feel it could be further fixed/improved.

Thank you in advance!

- Ahi

[Ea]

Since you've formatted it as PDF, I think it would be nice to include a little information about the type setting. And aren't you supposed to keep the PG 'header' text if you publish the file publically?

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Ea

And aren't you supposed to keep the PG 'header' text if you publish the file publically?

Not if don't say it's the PG text. Some time ago I asked and was told that it was fine to say that that the text was fetched from PG:

The two primary concerns in this case are:

1. Representing the changed work as an un-changed PG eBook.

2. Trading on the PG registered trademark (i.e., if someone is going to
be making money using it, they should share the wealth -- so to speak! <g>).

A note directing readers to the PG website where they can find the eBook
which you based your edition upon would be allowed. Just don't link or
point to the file itself, just to the website.

[HarryT]

If you mention PG anywhere in the eBook, then you have to include the full PG legal stuff in the file. If you make no mention whatsoever of PG, then you don't. What you can't do is say "this book comes from PG", but then not include the licence.

[Ea]

Thanks, Harry, Jellby I thought you *had* to mention it.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by HarryT

If you mention PG anywhere in the eBook, then you have to include the full PG legal stuff in the file. If you make no mention whatsoever of PG, then you don't. What you can't do is say "this book comes from PG", but then not include the licence.

The above piece was the reply I got (in Feb. 2008) to my question:

Now, the problem is I would like to give credit where credit is due, and say that I took the text from PG, which I think is a fair thing to do. But according to the license it looks as if I cannot even mention "Project Gutenberg", am I reading it right? If this is so, what is the right thing to do? isn't it unfair to just give the text without even metioning where I took it from? Would it be better to say I took it from www.gutenberg.org (instead of the phrase "Project Gutenberg")?

So I'd say as long you make it clear the text is modified and you are not making money, it's OK to mention PG (that's what I usually do in my uploads, anyway)

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Ea

Since you've formatted it as PDF, I think it would be nice to include a little information about the type setting. And aren't you supposed to keep the PG 'header' text if you publish the file publically?

In fact, let me go a step further from what is being said by our fellows:

I am not allowed to have either the PG header, or the PG name in the book at all, since it has been altered from the PG source.

Correcting a single error, I believe, removes one's right to use the PG trademark.

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With regards to typesetting information, it was generated with XeLaTeX using 11 pt embedded Adobe Garamond (but it isn't looking great, so I'm going to change the font)... 90mm by 120mm page, minimal borders (the exact dimensions I do not recall off the top of my head).

What else did you want to know?

- Ahi

P.s.: I will at some point add a colophon, Ea.

[JSWolf]

One of the problems with PDF vs. ePub is what I see here. I find the paragraph indent to be too big. So with ePub, I can go in and fix that. With PDF, I have to get you to make a new version. Plus, I don't like the header. So, would you be willing to do a version for everyone that wants some sort of change to it? I know ePub is not perfect. But it does allow people to fix the things they may not like.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

One of the problems with PDF vs. ePub is what I see here. I find the paragraph indent to be too big. So with ePub, I can go in and fix that. With PDF, I have to get you to make a new version. Plus, I don't like the header. So, would you be willing to do a version for everyone that wants some sort of change to it? I know ePub is not perfect. But it does allow people to fix the things they may not like.

Do you also change the slope of your staircases in order to deviate from the building code by just the right amount?

- Ahi

Ps.: If you aren't just complaining for complaining's sake, I'll be happy to post a Just-for-JSWolf version... just tell me what the perfect paragraph indentation is.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by ahi

Do you also change the slope of your staircases in order to deviate from the building code by just the right amount?

- Ahi

Ps.: If you aren't just complaining for complaining's sake, I'll be happy to post a Just-for-JSWolf version... just tell me what the perfect paragraph indentation is.

In fact--though you didn't ask--here's the source file that I worked from. Quotes are (mostly and automatically) fixed, paragraphs are all on their own line, some (not all) dashes are correctly fixed as em-dashes, and ellipses are represented by the ellipsis character (albeit some have an arguably necessary fourth dot after them that needs to be dealt with somehow).

It took me only a single day's work (albeit I am continuing refinements today) to get it to the shape that the PDF version is currently in. I encourage you, or whoever else, to make an ePub version and/or whatever else might suit fancies.

- Ahi

[Jellby]

Do you state somewhere who is the translator?

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Do you state somewhere who is the translator?

Very good point! No, I did not... and I'd be irate about such an omission.

I'll put some additional edition information at the beginning.

I'm actually regenerating the PDF with a font that displays better on 6" eInk screens.

- Ahi

Ps.: Fixing this is utterly painstaking... regenerating the PDF takes 2-3 minutes, and since changes propagate other difficult to foresee changes in the rest of the chapter, frequent regeneration is unavoidable. Leaving me sitting utterly bored out of my mind while I wait for compilation to finish.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by ahi

Ps.: Fixing this is utterly painstaking... regenerating the PDF takes 2-3 minutes, and since changes propagate other difficult to foresee changes in the rest of the chapter, frequent regeneration is unavoidable. Leaving me sitting utterly bored out of my mind while I wait for compilation to finish.

Yes, that's the drawback of PDF ebooks

And if you want it to be "perfect", you have to avoid widows and orphans, which I think I saw somewhere. In my PDFs, I chose to set \widowpenalty and \clubpenalty to 10000, and add some stretchability to \baselineskip; this results in no widows or orphans, but the lines are a bit spread out sometimes (it's not as bad as in printed books, because you see only a single page at a time, and you don't see the backpage either)

[ahi]

Jellby, the book is full of widows and orphans. It's probably literally impossible to avoid them and still have the book looking good, without generously large margins.

The considerable margins of paper books give a good bit of leeway for trickery that can help avoid them. While I've gotten rid of some outrageously ugly widows/orphans by forcing pagebreaks, I will not even try to get rid of less egregious ones.

Even the LaTeX typesetting of this PDF is definitely subpar, by professional publishing standards, as I do not have the energy to attend to it as thoroughly as it requires... however, even like that, it still looks better than any eBook of Casanova's Memoires that I have ever seen.

- Ahi

[ahi]

Added updated PDF. Should display a bit better.

So... who's making a new ePub version of the Memoirs?

- Ahi