Quote:
Originally Posted by Trane
One thing that mitigates all the points (AFAIC anyway) is that this is a how-to book, so if someone wants red or blue text and a different typeface, and the captions are in black arial, that's not a deal breaker to me, and I can't see it being one to the reader since this is a utility book.
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Other things to keep in mind about Accessibility (and why ebooks are awesome). As an example, many readers who are Dyslexic and may read with a specialized dyslexic font like OpenDyslexic:
https://opendyslexic.org/
Someone like that may have a very hard time reading your captions if they were in the JPG.
Just because YOU have no problems with the "Black Arial 12pt", doesn't mean others would have zero problems.
Ebooks are great because of the user preferences... and they can set it the way that perfectly works for them! Our job as the ebook makers is to create the clean text, and then step out of the way and let them read how they want.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Trane
I also won't be updating any pics in the future.
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That's what they all say... until next month you want to change the caption.
(That actually happened after I
strongly advised against it.) :P
They wanted it redone, I said "I told you so", and they paid me a second time to do the new captions (new caption images had "Figure #:" changed to bold)... then about a year later, guess what? They wanted the captions in HTML. Luckily I left the
proper HTML solution as an HTML comment... so I just swapped in the original uncaptioned images + a Search/Replace that took about a second.
So I got paid 3 times as much for something that should have been done the first time! :P
Quote:
Originally Posted by Trane
But I hear what you're saying and it's always best to err on the side of caution, and I know enough to know I don't know anything, and you've been through this and are cautioning me, and I am listening. I will re-do Turtle's suggestion in A.M. and look more closely at your code too to see if my pea brain can manage to figure it out (looked like a lot of captions?) and see if I can get up on this horse.
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Yeah, my example code is pretty much what I settled on. My solution has to work across hundreds of books, not just one. I can then use the same exact code whether there is zero/one/three captions + multiple images + sentences/paragraphs of explanation! :P
Most of the time you will probably just have a single caption, so you could go with something very simplified like this:
That initial example was out of one of the "harder" books. :P
Quote:
Originally Posted by Trane
Thanks wombat. I actually considered submitting the manuscript to a major print publisher instead. I'm still half-considering it.
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Hey I thought you said you would never redo those images!
Guess what the Publisher would do... they would want to style captions just like all their other books, and then they will pull their hair out and charge you MUCH MUCH more for submitting hardcoded captions! And they would look like complete crap because Print is much higher DPI (300+ DPI) than Web (~72 DPI). :P
Quote:
Originally Posted by Trane
But I hear what you're saying... have to just do a good job and realize the limits of the e-book industry at this point (i.e. the nonconformity compounded by the extraneous variables of all the devices). I'm starting to get it...
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And that's the thing, sort of like with this page-break-avoid, we follow the standards and hope devices in the future get better (and they will). Let's say 10 years down the line, Reader XYZ will avoid breaking the page and fit the captions right below the image... and you will be glad you had the foresight to make it work. Long-term thinking is the best thinking!
Quote:
Originally Posted by exaltedwombat
I recently moved across to the dark side and designed a book for print. It was quite a wrench to adjust to being in charge of everything - typeface, line ends, spacing, headers, page numbers - and they would show the same for all readers! :-)
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Yeah, designing a book for print opened my eyes to a massive amount of little niggles that I never noticed before. Makes you see where ebook renderers still need a ton of advancements (like in Justification/Hyphenation/Microtypography).