Quote:
Originally Posted by WillAdams
If doing epub, one is at the mercy of the formatting capabilities of whatever viewer the user has chosen and how that interacts w/ screen size / font size &c.
One can:
- manually tie together words or bits one believes shouldn't be broken (Dr. Livingston)
- put things which should not be broken, but might be into a no-break state (didn't)
- manually add discretionary hyphens where there's a possibility of the computer getting it wrong (pres-ent (a gift) vice pre-sent (to give to)) --- this won't work for instances in languages where the spelling has to change depending on whether or no it's hyphenated of course --- see above for a solution for that
- set the text ragged right
Above all, remove any manual line breaks which some idiot (or tormented Quark XPress user) inserted to force a particular linebreak
William
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Very good explanation, William.
In my youth, there was this book series that I really loved. Now I got all this books in pdf files, but I prefer epub. So at first I converted all the pdf files to html, edit them and then convert them epub so I can read them on my Bebook. (But to add this: I started to prove read, so I got all the paper books through ebay - when you think about it: I got the Bebook to reduce the amount of books in my house, but now it got bigger)
But then I noticed many errors and started to edit the html files.
The converter that I use (Calibre) justifies the text if you want, but of course, this still needs some work. Also, if you want, it adds a text intent on every new paragraph, so it really looks like in a real book.
One of the biggest problems however are the line breaks. Sometimes there is a line break in the middle of a sentence. And sometimes, a line break is missing, even though there should been one. So right now, when I read one of this ebooks and I see a line where a line break is missing or where there is one too much, I write this line down on paper and edit it later at home.
As for long words: I am not sure, but I think my e-reader (the Bebook 1) doesn't support hyphenation. I tried to add soft hyphenation on some long words, but somehow I never got it to work properly.
For example: a word like "Racecar" ... it was supposed to look like: Race- car, but in the end, it looked like Race car (the dash was missing).
I also tried the opposite. Words like e-commerce or Mary-Joe shouldn't be separated (at least imho), so I tried non breaking hyphen. Somehow this didn't work either. But I got it fixed with <nobr> tags. In all of the 27 books of the series, there is a guy named "Hans-Jürgen". A few times, the 2nd part of his name was moved to the next line, because of the "-" ... so now I edit all my ebooks to look like <nobr>Hans-Jürgen</nobr> ...
When I think about it: before I started to work with epub, I knew NOTHING about html ... but right now I am really getting into it (but of course I am still a novice)