Hi! I'm trying to adapt a spanish grammar book for epub publication. I've run into a challenge: language researchers have a specific way of presenting sentence analysis (see the examples in the attached picture, given with permission from the author), and these are giving me a real headache. This is pretty much an accepted standard in grammar books, and according to the author this layout can not be changed.
For paper publications this is solved by judiciously applying tab stops, for epub I don't know of a good solution that will not look awful on a variety of devices. As the source Word document contains more than 1000 examples a scriptable/grepable solution is the only thing that's realistic.
The approaches I've considered so far is:
- Rendering the examples as images
Slow, looks ugly, might be very awkward on smaller screens, and don't handle text resizing.
- Using a monospace font
Looks ugly, doesn't work on devices which don't support monospace/embeddable fonts
- SVG
Slow, limited device support
- Invisible tables
Does not seem to render consistently across devices, time consuming
I'm starting to think that epub is not a feasible format, but any suggestions would be welcome
