MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Any clever ways to replace image based dropcaps ?

stumped · 04-13-2018, 02:44 PM

I am reading a series of books that have what is, to me, a most annoying first character approach. Not a dropcap style but an annoying large single character image used for the first letter of each chapter. So I'm guessing there is a set of twenty six images in the epub -I have not looked closely at the code yet - and that they are used as IMG as needed in the html
What i'd like to do , just to my personal reading copies, is elegantly remove them, and substitute the relevant text character instead. The key word being elegant. I don't want to just brute force edit them away. That would be as unsatisfying as reading on, pretending they don't annoy me. And at fifty or more chapters per book it would be tedious
Any ideas ?
Maybe a compromise is to force each image to be about the size of a single character via a suitable CSS class on the IMG. That could maybe easily be regexed in?
Sometimes it helps to reverse the question, when inspiration is lacking. So how would one create and encode a set of first letter images, one per chapter, in some partially automated book production way? Why would any same person want to do that is a more philosopjical question

maybe the publishers were bored monks in a previous lifetime.

04-13-2018, 02:44 PM	#1
stumped Wizard Posts: 3,305 Karma: 10259306 Join Date: May 2016 Device: kobo forma, Kobo Libra, Huawei media Tab, fire HD10, PW3 HDX8.9,	Any clever ways to replace image based dropcaps ? I am reading a series of books that have what is, to me, a most annoying first character approach. Not a dropcap style but an annoying large single character image used for the first letter of each chapter. So I'm guessing there is a set of twenty six images in the epub -I have not looked closely at the code yet - and that they are used as IMG as needed in the html What i'd like to do , just to my personal reading copies, is elegantly remove them, and substitute the relevant text character instead. The key word being elegant. I don't want to just brute force edit them away. That would be as unsatisfying as reading on, pretending they don't annoy me. And at fifty or more chapters per book it would be tedious Any ideas ? Maybe a compromise is to force each image to be about the size of a single character via a suitable CSS class on the IMG. That could maybe easily be regexed in? Sometimes it helps to reverse the question, when inspiration is lacking. So how would one create and encode a set of first letter images, one per chapter, in some partially automated book production way? Why would any same person want to do that is a more philosopjical question maybe the publishers were bored monks in a previous lifetime.