MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Further chapters in the saga of bad ebook formatting

Joques · 05-21-2015, 12:31 PM

It never ends

I'm re-reading the first volume of the GAP series, which comprises the first two books, and the sloppy use of italics is killing me. Donaldson tends to use italics a lot, and in particular, in this series he italicizes the names of space ships. So you have Bright Beauty, Captain's Fancy and Starmaster, for instance, in italics.

But the tags for italics are all over the place. In some places the </em> will come several words after the name of the ship, so the words after the ship name will also be italicized. In other places, it will come _inside_ the ship name, so just the first part is italicized! I guess some intern had to sit with an editing tool and mark text with a mouse, and did a really sloppy job.

There is another repeated error: Donaldson always writes "Station" (as in space station) with a capitalized "S". I guess somebody decided to run a search and replace on "station" with lower-case "s", because all of a sudden you'll come across words like "manifeStations" or "I was at my data Station" or "she was Stationary"

(Yes, I have checked that the errors are in my original untouched epub files.)

05-21-2015, 12:31 PM	#1
Joques Addict Posts: 294 Karma: 107414 Join Date: May 2013 Device: Kobo Glo	Further chapters in the saga of bad ebook formatting It never ends I'm re-reading the first volume of the GAP series, which comprises the first two books, and the sloppy use of italics is killing me. Donaldson tends to use italics a lot, and in particular, in this series he italicizes the names of space ships. So you have Bright Beauty, Captain's Fancy and Starmaster, for instance, in italics. But the tags for italics are all over the place. In some places the </em> will come several words after the name of the ship, so the words after the ship name will also be italicized. In other places, it will come _inside_ the ship name, so just the first part is italicized! I guess some intern had to sit with an editing tool and mark text with a mouse, and did a really sloppy job. There is another repeated error: Donaldson always writes "Station" (as in space station) with a capitalized "S". I guess somebody decided to run a search and replace on "station" with lower-case "s", because all of a sudden you'll come across words like "manifeStations" or "I was at my data Station" or "she was Stationary" (Yes, I have checked that the errors are in my original untouched epub files.) Last edited by Joques; 05-21-2015 at 01:27 PM.