Quote:
Originally Posted by exaltedwombat
Customers seem to prefer a table to a text graphic.
I tried integrating captions with their picture. Got complaints that the text quality didn't match up, but they seem to accept the occasional orphaned caption. No accounting for taste!
If you want a real crash down to Earth, try formatting for a customer who has discovered Smashwords. They don't accept ANYTHING :-(
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Yes, this has created misery for us as well, even for fiction. If you are creating an ePUB with any embedded fonts, you need the xml file for Apple, to ensure that the fonts display. But that makes intake fail at Smashwords, which is using an older version of ePUBcheck. So, then, you have to remove it, which means that when the book is distributed via SW to iBooks, maybe the fonts will work; maybe they won't. This mightn't be the end of the world for something relatively minor, like Chapter heads; but it's death on a stick for an embedded font used for, say, Cyrillic letters or something akin.
I see that Rob over at 52N has taken a direct approach to it and simply made it expensive. That's one way of handling it, I suppose. We try to make our customers happy, but...there's only so many ways you can get stretched. We're already at (occasionally) two ePUBs, one for iBooks, one for everyone else; sometimes a third if it's a publisher (an ePUB optimized for Amazon), otherwise it's a MOBI...and now we have people complaining because
perhaps they loaded some obscure reading app on some Droid tablet and the file "doesn't look right" because they can override publisher defaults. It's a bloody headache, I tell you. Until something gets done about actual standardization--which I don't ever see happening--it's not going to get better, only worse.
And that's my happy thought du jour.
@mrmikel:
Basically, we test every table we do on a smaller device--either a Nook or an older/smaller Kindle. If it works there, great. If it doesn't, image. And folks here should remember that a Nook, for example, will skip right past a table, as though it doesn't exist, if the table is too long (too many rows, or too many wide rows) to display on a single screen. The reader won't even know it was there...it simply pages past it. Don't say you weren't warned!
Hitch