Quote:
Originally Posted by bookman156
In an epub they'd be pretty horrendous. I vote for leaving them out. [...]
Leaving them out you won't be missing anything and you won't be annoying the reader with duplicated text.
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Glad to see there's some widespread agreement on "useless pullquotes". :P
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Side Note: I know somewhere, somewhen, (maybe on her website?), Hitch showed a very good example of Media Queries.
For example, see some of the image examples on Booknook's:
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But, when dealing with actually meaningful content in asides/sidenotes...
The example I'm thinking of looked something like this:
HTML:
Code:
<p>Blah blah blah.</p>
<blockquote class="aside">
<hr class="optional"/>
<p class="aside">⚠ This is an important note.</p>
<hr class="optional"/>
</blockquote>
<p>This is some more text.</p>
KF7 would look like:
Code:
Blah blah blah.
-----------------------------
⚠ This is an important note.
-----------------------------
This is some more text.
On larger/modern devices, you'd apply CSS for:
- float: right
- 33% screen width.
- <hr/> above + below
On smaller/older devices, you'd apply CSS for:
- inline/"blockquote" style
- 100% screen width
- <hr/> above + below
- This could also be done with CSS3 ::before + ::after, but that would be less reliable across devices.
Still, I'm not a large fan of small width floats with text, because:
- it'll probably get annoying for readers for all the reasons listed
- + at decent-sized fonts, you sometimes only fit a handful of words per line.
Quote:
Originally Posted by j.p.s
But unless the author wanted to emphasize those snippets of text such bolding or pullquotes is a disservice to the author and (most?) readers.
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Yeah... to me, it seems like a holdover from Print—where you're dealing with a large, two-page spread. Or very large page sizes (like a newspaper) with very dense text + multiple columns/articles per page.
To have it in an ebook, where you're only dealing with a single chapter/article at a time... it seems dumb.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
What I would do if I was doing it is a one cell table with no lines showing and put the quote in there and have it be on the left or right side of the screen. I'm not sure how well this would work centered.
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No. Using a <table> for this would be completely unacceptable for Accessibility reasons.
<blockquote> or HTML5's/EPUB3's <aside>s are exactly what this sort of stuff is built for.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Fortunately in "The Circular Study" all the letters are short by Tom to Felix and the parallel next column are Tom's long "journal" entries about what he is really thinking and doing.
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Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. :P
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Sooner or later a Table will bite when used in an ebook unless it can fit on the smallest screen at a reasonable font size.
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Only use <table> for tabular data.
DO NOT use it for trying to place text side-by-side or any nonsense like that.
Ever since I began reading so much more Text-to-Speech, I've become extremely aware of poor <table> usage.
For more best practices, see my recent posts in:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
A Table almost the size of a full chapter is going to have problems.
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lol. I'm reminded of a few LibreOffice bugs where people have documents with multi-hundred page tables + cells larger than a page.
I just see such a report, then facepalm...
(Some of the more obscure bugreports then deal with widows/orphans breaking in these enormous multi-page cells too...)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
I've very old bilingual texts that are Irish and English. Fortunately (or unfortunately) they are PDFs and alternate pages. [...] Also I have some bilingual paper books that have Hebrew and English on facing pages and loads of footnotes.
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There were also Bibles where you had multi-column translations (4? + Notes) running down the pages all side-by-side.
Some crazy stuff they were designing.
In ebooks, a better way might be to have clickable buttons that swap between languages.
See below.
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!!!Complete Sidenotes Below!!!
Multi-Language Pages/Ebooks
Recently, I stumbled upon this KOReader bug:
which lead me down an entire typography wormhole.
These fantastic W3C pages were linked:
Especially see the Chinese one, where they have it in 3 languages:
- Traditional Chinese
- Simplified Chinese
- English
Each language is marked with a left colored border:
- Green = Traditional
- Orange = Simplified
- *Thick Green = Notes
You can then:
- Select between all languages using a button
- + an "All" option. (Default)
This is the kind of stuff where ebooks are actually doing things that aren't possible in Print.
Let's say you were reading an English+Old Irish book, you'd be able to toggle languages on and off as needed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
I can't read Irish anyway, and my fluent daughter can't read much of it because it's probably transcription of a 300 to 600 yo MSS and even 19th C. is hard for Irish speakers (they are 19th C. translations) because of the 1948 spelling reform.
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That's a whole other wormhole I was going down for a few weeks...
Language-Specific Fonts/Character Variants
Did you know that Cyrillic has the same letters... but the 3 different languages:
- Russian
- Bulgarian
- Serbian
draw them differently... even slightly different
italics. See:
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Old Cyrillic + Curly Ribbon Characters
And if you guys ever run across this funky-looking "curly ribbon" character mixed with some Greek-looking text:
- ꙋ = U+A64B = CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER MONOGRAPH UK
DO NOT confuse it with this curly-looking one:
- ȣ = U+0223 = LATIN SMALL LETTER OU
which is an "ου" (Latin/Greek) = omicron-upsilon ligature...
ꙋ is actually an older version of this:
which is an "оу" (Cyrillic) ligature.
Turns out, the text was:
This Old East Slavic / Church Slavonic stuff was all back in the 11th–14th century.
Side Note: There were also about a dozen different 'b'-looking characters that morphed into Cyrillic over the centuries:
- ь = Soft sign
- Ъ = Hard sign
- ҍ = Semisoft sign
- ѣ = Yat
- ꙏ = Yer
- [...]
See: