Gutenberg Conversion of Treasure Island

[sartori]

I just received my reader today and haven't put it down yet

I've just finished converting over a gutenberg text to a pdf. I've aimed at getting it to look as similar to a purchased ebook as far as font size and layout.

So far I've not noticed any of the problems of slow opening/page turns that others have mentioned. I just put it on the sd card via windows not the connect software - maybe that makes a difference.

File is attached. (final pdf is 497 pages)

Rob

[Kenal0]

Originally Posted by sartori

I just received my reader today and haven't put it down yet

I've just finished converting over a gutenberg text to a pdf. I've aimed at getting it to look as similar to a purchased ebook as far as font size and layout.

So far I've not noticed any of the problems of slow opening/page turns that others have mentioned. I just put it on the sd card via windows not the connect software - maybe that makes a difference.

File is attached. (final pdf is 497 pages)

Rob

Nice job it looks great.
Kenal0

[Laurens]

I agree. Good job! What font and size did you use? One idea would be to get rid of the whitespace between paragraphs as the first line indent is good enough to separate them. It's a matter of taste, though.

[sartori]

I used Adobe Garamond Pro - Semi-bold, size 17pt, leading 20.4pt for the body of the text.

The nice thing with this font family it it includes regular, italic, semi-bold, semi-bold italic, bold and bold italic. I find the semi-bold and bold work the best on the reader - the regular is just a little too light.

I've been playing around with acrobat this afternoon and I think I've figured out how to add links to the table of contents that can jump to the start of each chapter. I'll add those in the next book I create.

I'm hoping for an automated way to format the books (i'm watching the other threads) as this one took about an hour to layout manually.

Finally, my page setup was :

Width : 5.24in Height 6.69in
Margins : Top 0.5in Left 0.5in Right 0.5in Bottom 0.25in

The frame for the header text is 4.24in Wide 0.2667in High and is placed at x 2.62in y 0.2in.

Hope this helps.

Rob

P.S. Any suggestions for which book I should convert next?

[Laurens]

Originally Posted by sartori

I used Adobe Garamond Pro - Semi-bold, size 17pt, leading 20.4pt for the body of the text.

The nice thing with this font family it it includes regular, italic, semi-bold, semi-bold italic, bold and bold italic. I find the semi-bold and bold work the best on the reader - the regular is just a little too light.

Agreed. For serif fonts, regular weight is too light and "skinny".

[ath]

Originally Posted by sartori

I've just finished converting over a gutenberg text to a pdf. I've aimed at getting it to look as similar to a purchased ebook as far as font size and layout.

You might want to consider using line spacing also between paragraphs -- it helps keeping the page calm. I get the feel that paragraphs are trying to run away down the page, and flipping to the next page usually makes the lower lines 'move' because they're not aligned. Using line spacing would probably also help keeping the verses of the poetry together better.

For closer polishing, look over all words in the text that are in CAPITALS. They are usually (not always) words that make better sense in italics. HISPANIOLA, for instance, was certainly in italics in the original text. (The first word of every chapter, on the other hand, was probably set in initial capital followed by small caps originally -- and that should be doable with a Pro typeface.) That goes for almost all Gutenberg texts -- at least the older ones.

[BobVA]

Very, very nice. Thanks for putting this up.

(I'd vote for a Jules Verne novel next.)

[lordvetinari2]

It looks amazing, thanks a lot!

[sartori]

Originally Posted by ath

You might want to consider using line spacing also between paragraphs -- it helps keeping the page calm. I get the feel that paragraphs are trying to run away down the page, and flipping to the next page usually makes the lower lines 'move' because they're not aligned. Using line spacing would probably also help keeping the verses of the poetry together better.

I'm not sure what you mean with this? Should I increase the distance between paragraphs or decrease it? I want to develop my skills on laying out the text so i'd appreciate it if you could explain the above in another way.

I wasn't sure about the CAPS text, I thought it should be in italics but I didn't want to change the text too much from the original guttenberg. Now I know that is how they usually identify italics I'll keep it in mind for the next book.

I've just figured out how to add the links to the chapters from the table of contents in the pdf so I'll add that in the next book.

I use InDesign & Acrobat to put them together - I know it is expensive (but I own it for my business) so if others use it and are interested in my workflow I can put together some instructions.

Thanks for the feedback,

Rob

[ath]

Originally Posted by sartori

Should I increase the distance between paragraphs or decrease it?

As you're using InDesign, check the paragraph format, the Indents and Spacing tab, and make sure that Space before and Space After are both zero (0p0). That way, paragraphs will be separated by leading only (unless you're using a frame that stretches them later...)

I wasn't sure about the CAPS text, I thought it should be in italics but I didn't want to change the text too much from the original guttenberg.

Project Gutenberg has, earlier at least, avoided all kinds of markup, such as identification of italics, small caps, boldface, etc. Thus, upper case has often been used instead of such markup. But I see it is beginning to change: at least some books now use _..._ around text in italics.

Same thing with accented characters -- the accent is typically just dropped, I think. Bad for foreign language words, or quotations. Gutenberg texts available as HTML gets this right, I think. I recall a thread over at teleread.org about this -- you might want to check it out for ideas:

http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=5509

(or go there, search for 'Gutenberg HTML' and look for author Branko Collin, in case the link isn't permanent.)

[lint]

the formatting looks great. any chance I can get it in an RTF?

Wish we had a website for user submitted formatted SONY books. We know how we like them formatted. Some mass reformat tool from any of these sites will never do nearly as good.

-lint

[sartori]

Originally Posted by lint

Wish we had a website for user submitted formatted SONY books. We know how we like them formatted. Some mass reformat tool from any of these sites will never do nearly as good.
-lint

I recently registered mysonyreader.com and myportablereader.com for this very purpose. I'm going to wait until I have a few more converted before I work on putting a site together though.

Rob

[dtenenbo]

Originally Posted by lint

the formatting looks great. any chance I can get it in an RTF?

Wish we had a website for user submitted formatted SONY books. We know how we like them formatted. Some mass reformat tool from any of these sites will never do nearly as good.

-lint

http://manybooks.net seems to offer Sony formatted books as well as large-text PDFs.

[lint]

"http://manybooks.net seems to offer Sony formatted books as well as large-text PDFs."

true, but they don't come anywhere close to even the most basic formatting a pair of eyes can do let alone the beauty of Sartoris formatting.

-lint

[reading_nut]

Originally Posted by sartori

I used Adobe Garamond Pro - Semi-bold, size 17pt, leading 20.4pt for the body of the text.

Hope this helps.

Rob

P.S. Any suggestions for which book I should convert next?

Great stuff. I really appreciate the hard work that went into this. I'm currently reading "Dracula" from Gutenberg, and would be interested in doing a similar conversion...

Seems to me like we should consider some coordination here. It would be too bad if 3/4 people were working to convert the same book at the same time!

Any ideas on this? Maybe a "sticky thread" for books being converted?

Anybody else working on a similar conversion?