Mystery and Crime Wallace, Edgar: The Daffodil Mystery. v2, 17 June 2008

[HarryT]

Originally published in 1920. Also known as The Daffodil Murder.

When Mr Thomas Lyne, poet, poseur and owner of Lyne's Emporium insults a cashier, Odette Rider, she resigns. Having summoned detective Jack Tarling to investigate another employee, Mr Milburgh, Lyne now changes his plans. Tarling and his Chinese companion refuse to become involved. They pay a visit to Odette's flat. In the hall Tarling meets Sam, convicted felon and protege of Lyne. Next morning Tarling discovers a body. The hands are crossed on the breast, adorned with a handful of daffodils...

Enjoy!

Note: This book was prepared from a revised version of a book uploaded to PG. There is another edition, prepared by Dr. Drib, available for download here.

EDIT: 17 Jun 08

Recreated the book with improved layout and formatting. Uploaded v2.

Previous download count: 118

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[Dr. Drib]

By the way, I think I know what causes a blank page to occur between the Contents and the Chapter I. - with me, it usually happens when I do a forced page break. (However, even when the word Chapter is set to Title attribute, one doesn't always get a forced new page...go figure.)

Musings:

There are so many weird anomolies in BD. I've experimented with ways to get rid of the overhanging underline on a linked Contents page - but not satisfactorily. I've even experimented with a small bullet, but I'm not happy with that look. I wish we could do away with underlined links altogether....I hope that's being worked on in the next incarnation of this great program.

Getting back to that extended, overhaning left line on a link: I'm wondering if it's caused because there's an indentation that we don't see on Paragraph mode?

Has anyone experimented, do you know, with creating styles? I'm afraid to experiment, thinking I might screw up something forever.. Then I would never be able to upload a book again.

Anyway, your new version now matches all the Edgar Wallace titles from you that I've downloaded.

Thanks!

Don

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

By the way, I think I know what causes a blank page to occur between the Contents and the Chapter I. - with me, it usually happens when I do a forced page break. (However, even when the word Chapter is set to Title attribute, one doesn't always get a forced new page...go figure.)

I think in this case it's for no more mysterious a reason than the fact that, in the "small" font size, the contents list goes right to the very bottom of the page, and the blank line below the last entry in the contents gives the blank page. If you switch to "Medium" font size, the contents goes half way down the next page, and there's no blank page.

Musings:

There are so many weird anomolies in BD. I've experimented with ways to get rid of the overhanging underline on a linked Contents page - but not satisfactorily. I've even experimented with a small bullet, but I'm not happy with that look. I wish we could do away with underlined links altogether....I hope that's being worked on in the next incarnation of this great program.

A while ago vvv said that there there was no way to eliminate the "hanging underline". He did say, though, that the next version would underline all the "link words" rather than just the first one.

Getting back to that extended, overhaning left line on a link: I'm wondering if it's caused because there's an indentation that we don't see on Paragraph mode?

It's definitely an indentation, yes!

Has anyone experimented, do you know, with creating styles? I'm afraid to experiment, thinking I might screw up something forever.. Then I would never be able to upload a book again.

Is there a way of creating styles? Like you, I don't want to risk "breaking" anything .

Anyway, your new version now matches all the Edgar Wallace titles from you that I've downloaded.

Thanks!

It's my pleasure.

[Anais9000]

Originally Posted by HarryT

A while ago vvv said that there there was no way to eliminate the "hanging underline". He did say, though, that the next version would underline all the "link words" rather than just the first one.

Harry, I explained how to fix this in my message to you back in the thread: Dickens, Charles: Bleak House (Illustrated) v1, 2007-03-29

>> I notice your books have the same problem I had with the underline of the table of contents hanging out one extra place to the left. I managed to solve that by inserting a single nbsp between the DIV and A tags:
[DIV align=left] ADD ampersandNBSP; HERE
[A href="file:///C:whatever#bdn__1"]I.ChapterOne[/A]

>> If the chapter titles are guaranteed short enough not to break at the largest size, you can also change the spaces to no-break-spaces so that the whole chapter title gets underlined, and also has the "highlight on mouseover" effect.

>> I forgot to mention that the align attribute for the DIV has to be changed from "justify" to "left", as shown in the example


That's how I get the TOCs in my postings to look so nice...

[Dr. Drib]

did you notice that the chapter headings WITHIN the text itself are not centered? (Look at your Henry Adams Democracy title.)

It would drive me absolutely batty to designate something centered, and then have it not centered.

The TOC looks very nice, however.

I'm not sure I understand your explanation. (Please keep in mind that I'm an old man of 55 with limited intelligence.)

Can you translate this:

[DIV align=left] ADD ampersandNBSP; HERE
[A href="file:///C:whatever#bdn__1"]I.ChapterOne[/A]

into another another language?


Thanks,
Don

[Anais9000]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

did you notice that the chapter headings WITHIN the text itself are not centered? (Look at your Henry Adams Democracy title.)

It would drive me absolutely batty to designate something centered, and then have it not centered.

The TOC looks very nice, however.

I'm not sure I understand your explanation. (Please keep in mind that I'm an old man of 55 with limited intelligence.)

Can you translate this:

[DIV align=left] ADD ampersandNBSP; HERE
[A href="file:///C:whatever#bdn__1"]I.ChapterOne[/A]

into another another language?


Thanks,
Don

I never noticed that about the chapter headings. I think I see why, but I'll have to do some testing.

About the hanging underlines, sorry the example looks so complicated. All I'm trying to indicate is that you need to 1) change the DIV align=justify in front of each TOC entry to DIV align=left and then 2) add a no-break-space immediately after the DIV tag.

Of course, to edit the html you have to use the Tools / HTML Fragment Editor in BD.

I was using square brackets because I wasn't sure that the forum software would display the angle brackets or interpret them as html.

The other thing that might look mysterious is: I.ChapterOne
Those squares show where I change the regular spaces to no-break-spaces to get the underline and highlight to apply to the whole chapter title instead of just the first word.

Hope this helps.

[Dr. Drib]

The window is staring me in the face, but I don't know how to use it at all, let alone on the TOC in order to get rid of those pesky overhanging linked lines.

I checked the help, but there's not enough there to give me any idea what to do.

Perhaps a little walk-through, like the one Harry put together that most of us relied on at the very beginning of our immersion in BD, would be applicable.

Thanks,
Don

[Anais9000]

Double-click the TOC (or paragraph, any other section) to highlight it in BD, then click the H2 (html fragment editor) button. Or open the fragment editor and check "whole code" and the entire book loads into the window as html.

Not to complicate matters, but obviously I don't do this manually for every TOC entry. What I do is to open the somebook.htm page in BD, which creates a Temp\tmp1\2\somebook.html0 page in the BookDesigner directory. Then I run a search-and-replace routine on this file
<DIV align=justify><A href= ==> <DIV align=left>&nbsp;<A href=
among many other cleanup replacements, to handle hanging dashes, quotemark widows, etc.
Then I load the html0 file into BD, do any "unique-to-this-book" modifications, and click Make.

[HarryT]

Recreated the book with improved layout and formatting. Uploaded v2.