[ahi]

Greetings,

I find reading eBooks with sloppy or otherwise subpar typography to be unpleasant. However I have no crazed notions that volunteer editors/converters owe me any specific level of typographic sophistication, and I accept that I will likely have to take matters into my own hand.

My question is, am I better off converting existing eBooks into some editable format (like Project Gutenberg's EPUBs), do my fixing, then convert them back; or is it better to just work straight from the plaintext and make my own eBooks from scratch?

Obviously I am looking to minimize my work and maximize the typographic quality. So please answer my question with that in mind. I should note though that I already tried calibre, and I don't think its conversion feature goes far enough for what I want.

I have this dream about creating a clever Python parser/converter that takes Project Gutenberg text files and creates typographically gorgeous 4.9" by 6.9" PDF files from them via XeLaTeX (to take advantage of a few high quality OTF fonts I have). However any such project will doubtless require a lot of work before it gets past the point of every new file thrown at it resulting in flawed output (i.e.: until the source code is expanded to account for said new files own little idiosyncrasies).

So in the meantime though, I would be grateful for any tips, tricks, and suggestions that are more grounded and achievable.

Sincerely,

AHI