[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Psymon

Maybe I should come work for you -- at least, once I know what the hell I'm doing a little better.

Nah, I don't accept people who use fonts with non-standard character positions.

Most of my work is working from PDF scans of old books/articles -> OCR (Optical Character Recognition) -> EPUB -> Running through rounds of tests to wittle down errors and normalize the code.

Originally Posted by Psymon

I'm not sure what you mean? I just meant to do up each page of that "olde" part of my work as in image -- which, in fact, I've already done, and also in PDF format, too...

http://www.imaginary-friend.ca/epistyll.html

If you scroll down the page, you'll see it as images, and if you scroll further down from that, you can get it as PDF (and at higher resolution).

Ahhh, I see. I was thinking ligatures -> images -> shrink/expand along with the digital text. Sort of like what I recommended in post #16 in this topic (that topic also brings up using SVG for the same purpose):

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=222825

If you are going entire pages as images, then I would recommend regenerating those images of the pages at much higher resolution, so that they are actually readable.

Originally Posted by Psymon

Is that "against the rules", to include a PDF within an epub file?

As mrmikel said, it is "against the rules", there are some non-standard ways of doing it.... and I would not go down that route AT ALL. Any method of including it inside of the EPUB I guarantee will get broken.

Originally Posted by Psymon

As I've said before, I've looked for YEARS (if not decades), and I don't know of any others! Not free and embeddable, anyway, but even "paid" and not-embeddable there's probably only a couple. :/

Well that is the good thing about the "hive-mind" of a large forum such as this. The internet is a huge place, and others will know things that you don't.

Originally Posted by Psymon

Very cool.

And hey, if I did step on anyone's toes or offend anyone with my "money, money, money" comment, I do apologize. I used to do freelance web design, and I got pretty sick of that kind of single-minded perspective of my clients, and perhaps that sorry experience left me a little presumptuous and jaded. D'oh... :/

All is forgiven (at least on my end). I know that it hurts when people tell you something that is so near and dear to you was done wrong and should be fixed (I am a programmer). All the more reason to try to do it right in the first place!

Code will always need to be maintained, so while you are coding, you try to take steps while initially making the program to make it easier to go back at a future point and update/fix/expand sections.

This is one of the reasons why I initially got into EPUBs. The economics site releases every single book for free as PDF (also release all speeches/lectures/videos for free... FREE, FREE, FREE (not "money, money, money" )). Then they started releasing EPUBs of the entire catalog. My entire life/worldview was changed from these free books (the books, and the Institute are now very near and dear to me).

When I took apart the EPUBs, to my horror, I noticed ugly, unmaintainable spaghetti code! I would try to tweak one thing in the CSS (example, fixing font-size in one class), and unexpected things would change (sections I expected to be completely unrelated would become HUGE/tiny). The way the whole document was coded just made it an overall nightmare to tweak.

Yes, it looks great if you are reading it on the PC, and it works fine if you read it at default font-size, and it looks pretty good on the device........... BUT, the code is a giant mess, and if/when the new formats come out, these EPUBs will be a big pain to fix/update. I can guarantee you something will break and not transfer as expected, it would be a pain to fix that code. Not to mention the converted code itself would be a huge bloated mess.

In my case, I "normalize" all of the CSS throughout our entire catalog of EPUBs (I use the same exact CSS, with only minor tweaks per book). I keep the code extremely minimal (which means less breakage across devices + less chance of anything breaking in future formats). This makes it easy as pie to go in and do any tweaks.

I also try to more closely maintain the "spirit" of the original book.

Here is an example of a recent one I redid last month.

Image of Original PDF + Old EPUB + New EPUB:



Here is Old + New in ADE:



When I redid this, we also decided to toss in higher resolution photographs of the authors:



I have attached the Before/After EPUBs. (Although this old EPUB wasn't that bad... I have some spaghetti code HORRORS if you really want to see them).

I get paid every so often to go back and touch up old EPUBs (if we need to fix up typos, add a Preface, add a new cover, etc.).

While I am at it, I just bring it up to the standards of all the other EPUBs I have been creating. Doing it this way is much better for the long-term of the book, which means YEARS from now, we can easily transfer the books from EPUB -> future format. As I said before, these books/ideas will last until time immemorial. A specific implementation in iBooks will not.

Originally Posted by mrmikel

As I understand it, everyone is showing their concern based on the very bitter fact that if you do things we understand you to be doing, you will end up having to do it all over from scratch.

Thank you for that, that is exactly the type of eloquent wording I wish I used.