[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Section8

Currently, I'm just generating them as jpegs, but have been considering converting them to <table>s in the html. My strong intuition is that a table this wide in html isn't going to render in a sane way on any current ereader, and this isn't worth pursuing.

• Is this for personal usage?
  • If it is for personal usage, you can do whatever you want.
• Is this aimed towards any specific devices?
  • Tablets/large devices you can be more lenient
  • If this is aimed towards ADE, you might have to work around ADE bugs, if it is aimed for only iBooks... etc. etc.
• Is this being sold at Amazon/B&N/other stores?
• Is this being sold from your personal site/store?
  • From your personal store, you can be more lenient.
• Is this EPUB aimed towards copy/pastability?
  • Let us say someone wants to reference this table. You just made their life a million times easier if they can just copy it right out of the EPUB, instead of having to manually recreate it.
  • Let us say there was an actual error in the original book. A fix in HTML is WAY easier than a fix in an image.
• Is this conversion aimed for a more ultimate goal? (HTML put on a website, looking towards future formats).

Also, if there are LOTS of images in the book, just keep in mind that all those images really start to add up in filesize. The equivalent HTML table will be MUCH smaller (and compress much better).

Depending on the design of the table, you may also want to swap the x and y axis to make it more "vertical" oriented, OR split the table into multiple tables.

The quickest way I have found to swapping (Transposing) an HTML table is getting all the information into a spreadsheet program (in my case, I use LibreOffice Calc), and following these steps:

https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Ro...es_Transposing

Then I can easily export as XHTML and do some quick cleanup.

Originally Posted by Section8

Are jpegs the best way to go with tables like this?

No JPG! PNG in this case! I have an explanation/examples here (and a link to the program that I use to compress PNGs (ScriptPNG)):

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...5&postcount=26

This is a pet peeve of mine.... lossless formats should be used when dealing with "artificial" images.

Originally Posted by mrmikel

Almost always unless you can be sure they will be displayed on a large tablet. Even then somebody can increase the font size and blow up the table.

Well at a certain point, all but the most very basic design decisions will be exploded due to extremely large font sizes. IF the reader has poor eyesight (or prefers reading in a certain font/size), an image of a table with very tiny font won't do any better.

Also, keep in mind readers who are blind. Images of tables are completely useless to them.

I prefer to have actual HTML images in the books, so that they scale with the rest of the text, and go along with all the other user preferences.

Originally Posted by mrmikel

You might want to experiment with different types of images, gif, png, etc to see what gives you the best image for the least memory consumption. Probably not too big a deal if there are only a few of them.

It is a HUGE deal! Down with JPG!!! Down with GIF too!

The equivalent PNG will ALWAYS be smaller than GIF (PNG has less overhead).

Originally Posted by mrmikel

Images are pretty easy to snapshot out of the pdf. Just make sure your viewer program snapshot is set to as good a resolution as you need.

Yes, and remember that high resolution images can always be scaled DOWN, but low resolution images cannot be scaled UP (without looking like complete garbage).

Another thing that irks me about images of tables is when they take a tiny thumbnail image of a table that is COMPLETELY unreadable.

Here is an example of a table I "verticalized" + some more JPG-PNG examples.

Original Page from the PDF:



Here is an image of my "verticalized" HTML table in Sigil:



JPG (Grayscale 90 + 80 quality):



The filesize is 82.8 KB and 65.6 KB. The artifacting in the image will only get worse from there if you want to try to aim for a "reasonable" filesize.

PNG (Grayscale PNG saved right from GIMP + Compressed with ScriptPNG):



The filesize is 37.8 KB and 31.3 KB. These images have ZERO artifacting, and are less than half the size of those JPGs.

In the future, let us say an even better lossless filetype comes out, or an even better compression algorithm. These images can also be made even smaller with ZERO loss.

Here is the PDF:

http://library.mises.org/books/Willi...20Currency.pdf

and I have attached the actual WIP EPUB if you want to take a look.