As I announced elsewhere, I'm working in "The Book of the Thousand Nights and [One|A] Night". I've more or less finished formatting the first volume of Payne's translation Burton's will take a bit longer because it has more and longer footnotes, and the PG text is worse.
Here is a preview of what the book will look like, still missing cover and some information, but I want to show the preview because it's a bit fancy, and I hope to get some feedback (whether it works and whether you like it).
Some decisions: Payne's translation does not divide the text in nights, it simply adds the night numbers as sidenotes. I've decided to add the night headlines to keep some of the "feeling" of the wrapping story (Shehrzad/Scheherazade interrupting the story every day and continuing the next night). For the same reason, in Payne's and Burton's translation I've set the nights as "chapters", besides, having the stories as "chapters" would be a daunting task, given the complex nesting, especially in this first volume. Nights are a bit more uniform in size, and pagebreaks there are more appropriate.
Neither translation has any explicit formatting for when a story ends or is interrupted, I've added some dingbats: a large closing quote when it ends, a flower when it is interrupted or resumed (see pages 27, 28, 41, 52 in the pdf). I've also added a large asterisks in the caesura of verses (Burton does it, Payne only uses the capital letter) to ease the long lines. Finally, I've added some stars to the right of the story titles, marking the "level" of the story to help keep track (the more stars, the deeper the story is). All these marks are added with generated content, so they will probably not appear in most epub readers, but there will be at least linebreaks, I hope; I might add the marks explicitly in the final version. (Actually the marks are added in an alternate stylesheet, so ideally it should be possible to enable/disable them on the fly; this is the case if you open the xhtml files in a browser and use, for instance the
context style switcher firefox plugin.)
There are two tocs. One for nights, indicating when stories start or end (but not which story), and another for stories, indicating which nights start during each story (not including sub-stories).
I'm attaching the epub and a pdf to serve as a kind of reference rendering.
I await your feedback
