Editor's Note: bowerbird graciously allowed us to move this post to its own thread, it was originally posted here.
-- NatCh
vivaldirules said:
> I had dreamy visions of downloading all of Project Gutenberg and
> carrying a fair fraction of all mankind's knowledge and wisdom with me
> everywhere. This was to be a monumental step-change in my life.
> The first thing I did was to download a book from there in TXT format,
> import and copy it to my Reader, and with great anticipation I sat down
> to enjoy it. I was instantly dismayed by how distracting it was to read
> with broken lines, forced hyphenation, poor pagination, and no indexing.
this has been something i've been working on for some time...
and, ironically, i just sent a message to the p.g. listserves yesterday,
constructing a list of the things that need to be done to a p.g. e-text
in order to make it typographically beautiful, and asking for input...
so i will repeat the list -- and the request for input -- here, for you...
> the idea is that you've loaded a plain-ascii p.g. e-text into
> your word-processor or desktop-publishing program with
> the objective of making it beautiful. what exactly do you do?
>
> please add to this, the start of a list, off the top of my head:
>
> 1. get rid of that ugly legalese at the top of the file.
> 2. make the title-page and front-matter look nice.
> 3. hotlink the table of contents. make one if necessary.
> 4. make all the headers big, bold, and distinctive, and
> 5. start chapters on a new page, maybe even a recto.
> 6. get rid of the empty lines between paragraphs, and
> 7. use book-style indents on each paragraph instead.
> 8. use full justification. or at least half-ragged.
> 9. use a reasonable line-width. full-screen is too wide.
> 10. white-space is free in an e-book, so use it liberally.
> 11. make block-quotes distinctive, for remix purposes.
> 12. links are great, but spare us the ugly blue underlines.
> 13. is an unlucky number.
> 14. don't put pagenumbers inside the text/paragraphs.
> 15. turn pg-ascii underscored text into _real_ italics.
> 16. pictures (even doodad thingees) enliven the text.
> 17. navigation aids among chapters are quite useful.
> 18. footnotes should have links going _both_ ways.
> 19. if it works better that way, turn a table on its side.
> 20. resize tables and images so they fit on one screen.
> 21. give your readers the luxury of generous leading!
> 22. block-quotes should be indented on the left and right.
> 23. create running heads and/or footers on each page.
> 24. (leaving some space for you...)
> 25. (leaving some space for you...)
> 26. show where we are in the book (page 39 of 208).
> 27. make the framework of the document _obvious_.
> 28. what the heck, just for the fun of it, make an index!
> 29. make the typesize big enough to be read easily!
> 30. get rid of that ugly legalese at the bottom of the file.
>
> these are general strategies. not all of them will be
> applicable to any one specific situation, and some
> (e.g., #8) are up to the preferences of the individual.
>
> and obviously, some of these could be fragmented
> into a very large number of sub-points, like #10...
again, if there's anything you can add, i would appreciate it.
my aim is to write a program that will do a mass-beautification
of the entire project gutenberg library. i've made good progress.
> I don't have to tell you what happened when I then tried PDF files
> from the Internet Archive.
i wish you would've told us. i assume the text was too small to read.
-bowerbird