As a side note, "off-topicness"/discussion like this is great! It may potentially stop others from getting headaches of their own.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
[...] and I can't see the point in re-doing it all only to make it all look less nice. :/
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
So I may as well just stick with what I've got!  After all, it works great, looks great, not to mention there was an enormous amount of work/time that went into creating it -- if I was to change the font, I'd pretty much have to start all over, from scratch. |
Yes yes, you already sunk in a lot of time/effort into the book, but it is better to sink time/effort and do it right
FROM THE BEGINNING.
You have to think of the long-term view of the book. The way that the book is designed is going to cause yourself lots of headaches in the future because you designed it "wrongly" in the first place.
I agree with Jellby, that you should create it with the correct underlying characters, and leave it to the font/software to combine the ligatures.
I am reminded of one book I ran into earlier this year. It was designed in Open Office, had a massive amount of medical terminology, and they decided to not use the actual unicode characters α, β, γ, δ, but overriding normal characters by using a weird font (I forget the specific font used).
Sure, if you read it in Open (or Libre) Office, the document looked fine, if you used Open Office to print to PDF, the document looked fine as PDF... but the underlying text itself was a GIANT mess. When I tried to export to HTML/EPUB, it was a hideous hodge-podge of code + not matching characters.... making it nearly impossible to change into an ebook (I abandoned the project because it would be too much time/effort to convert).
Because of the way the author designed the original document, that book will most likely forever be stuck as a .odt + .pdf.
Imagine in the future, you want to transfer this book to a website (or better yet, imagine the format beyond EPUB/KF8, or future reading devices)..... the way you are designing your book now, you are locking yourself into the very quirks of THAT SPECIFIC FONT (plus all your weird quirks you are coding in for this specific READING PROGRAM (iBooks)).
Your book will last until time immemorial... iPads/iBooks? not so much.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
I'm flattered you actually have a folder for me -- don't expect it to get filled up too soon! |
Everything I download on a forum is organized into per-user folders. So then at a later date I can reference back to it + give credit where credit is due (if it was some good code, or I learn something from it).
I think it is a pretty good system. And in a few years when I see this user "Psymon" asking us how to convert his "olde" EPUB designed for iBooks into format X, Y, or Z, I will know where to start.
Or if *GASP* MobileRead disappears and I find "Psymon" on another forum complaining, I can do a search for your username and find your "olde" EPUB. Then I can say I told you so.
