Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
Wow what you've described seems to require an awful lot of labor on the part of e-book creators, but I guess if you want a layout by hand, then an awful lot of labor is what you're in for.
Go for it, I'll be interested to see what you can come up with.
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I'm not sure I agree with the "an awful lot of labor" part. But, certainly, the more time the eBook creator spends the better the output will be.
Think of it as starting out with a LaTeX source code that can generate a reasonably good (probably via \sloppy and other such relaxations of strictness) document for any size... then you start looking at the output at the sizes you actually expect people to generate (5" page size, 6" page size, with 11pt and 14pt fonts--4 different versions, basically) and you eliminate any blatant errors. (e.g.: a quoted letter's signature line ending up a widow, quoted poetry being poorly line-broken due to an overly narrow page-size, et cetera)
As oft-noted before, it took me a bit less than a full day's of work to generate
8 different versions of my The Art of War eBook... and frabjous is of the opinion that with the right set of commands/macros and some practice, it need not even take that long.
Quote:
Originally Posted by acidzebra
If you have somewhat decent source material, it could be as simple as
source (pref. HTML or RTF) > pacify.py > TeX document > PDF with little or no manual intervention. For perfectionists like the typographers here this will never be an option but for us joe schmoe users it would definitely yield a vastly better-looking book to read with little extra work.
I've been toying with this process for the past week and the custom 505-formatted PDFs with full justification and proper hyphenation, my fave font and so on (all this from a properly chosen /preamble and document layout) are really worth it IMHO.
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That's my ultimate goal. And it could literally be that simple, with a clever interactive mode where the script's assumptions about autodetected chapter titles, poetry, et cetera can be confirmed or disabused by the user *before* the output is written. (i.e.: you might not need to adjust/fix chapters and/or poems/quoted letters at all)
What the eBook maker might additionally do in the spirit of getting multiple fixed layout versions figured out for users in advance is... well, what I describe above in my answer to Kovid.
- Ahi