"Star Dragon" SF novel for free

[Liviu_5]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Mobipocket/AZW don't have hyphenation support as well.

Isn't hyphenation support a matter of the reading software not of the file format?

Fbreader on my 770 does have hyphenation support in a variety of languages irrespective of the format of the file (txt, html, prc, opf, rtf)

[Gudy]

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

Isn't hyphenation support a matter of the reading software not of the file format?

Pretty much, yes. Unless you're talking stuff like image-based formats or non-reflowable PDFs, hyphenation is part of the rendering process on the device, and therefore dependent on the software, not the file format.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

Isn't hyphenation support a matter of the reading software not of the file format?

Fbreader on my 770 does have hyphenation support in a variety of languages irrespective of the format of the file (txt, html, prc, opf, rtf)

Yes, as long as you have the language in the metadata, you can support hyphenation on the reading software.

[Richard Herley]

Hadrien, hyphenation is a Good Thing, but, as I wrote to you the other day, there are problems when the process is automated.

Here for others to ponder is a quote from my email to Hadrien:

I have been looking at your editions of my books, as well as some others of yours, and I have what I hope is some constructive criticism about the problems of word-division. In composing text I strive at all times to make it run smoothly, so that the reader becomes drawn into the story and almost forgets he is reading at all. One of my desk-side reference works is HART'S RULES, and he says (p. 13) "avoid division if at all possible ... Not to incovenience the reader must always be one of the main considerations." If you're not familiar with this excellent little book I can send you the relevant pages.

Now I found that the algorithm Feedbooks uses does not observe usual practice in word-division, leading to some odd formations which hold the reader up. This is especially noticeable when division does not take place according to etymology, when division breaks two consonants that should be kept together, and when division takes place at the end of a page and the start of the next ("A divided word should not end at a right-hand page, if it is possible to avoid it").

A top-notch compositor exercises a high degree of skill and judgement in deciding whether or how to divide, but obviously it's completely out of the question for Feedbooks to make these divisions by hand.

I can see why you have chosen a Schoolbook font, in that size, but Schoolbook is rather large in the body, which means relatively few characters per line. This then increases the need for division, if the page is to be justified. Reducing the font size, perhaps choosing one that's more condensed, and increasing the leading, would leave you with an equally legible page. If you also went for a ragged-right layout, the need for division would be reduced still further. By then there might be so few divisions that it would be practical to eyeball the remaining text.

I am not for a moment suggesting that you reformat any of your existing ebooks, but these ideas might help improve your books in the future. But even as it is, yours are far better than some of the commercial ebooks I have seen.

We need to make the experience of e-reading as much like conventional reading as possible.

Hadrien, do you, or anyone else, have any technical suggestions about hyphenation? It's one of those things like em dashes and curly quotes that need to be got right if e-reading is to thrive.

My usual word-processor for drafting fiction is an ancient DOS program called XyWrite. That allows you to compile a "hyphenation dictionary", a list of preferred break-places in words. Maybe something similar could be applied here.

[tompe]

As I understand it LaTeX is used and it is easy to include hyphenation for specific words. So you could have a web page were readers could enter words that was hyphenated badly to minimize the work you need to do.

[WillAdams]

Hadrien, looking forward to your thoughts / comments. You can see some of what I've done in the TeX / LaTeX world in the TeX Showcase ( http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/ ) as well as my portfolio ( http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/willadams/portfolio.html ). Also, I was the TUG 2003 proceedings editor (and eventually managed to get my own presentation written up, http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/.../tb77adams.pdf )

JSWolf, everyone, agreed, the lack of hyphenation is bizarre in that it'd be really easy to support by just allowing manually inserted soft hyphens to function --- given the rules of English this would require tagging the text for each word's part of speech / usage to do it automatically, but that's something which will need to happen eventually for AI research.

William

[Hadrien]

Yeah sorry Richard, I haven't answered to this e-mail yet. First of all:

I can see why you have chosen a Schoolbook font, in that size, but Schoolbook is rather large in the body, which means relatively few characters per line. This then increases the need for division, if the page is to be justified. Reducing the font size, perhaps choosing one that's more condensed, and increasing the leading, would leave you with an equally legible page.

You can set another font and font size using our Custom PDF feature on Feedbooks.

If you also went for a ragged-right layout, the need for division would be reduced still further. By then there might be so few divisions that it would be practical to eyeball the remaining text.

Not a big fan of ragged-right, it feels like reading a screen instead of reading a book. Still, that's something we could probably add as an option in our Custom PDF feature.

Now I found that the algorithm Feedbooks uses does not observe usual practice in word-division, leading to some odd formations which hold the reader up.

We use LaTeX for our PDF files, so it's the TeX algorithm (like FBReader). Tweaking the settings or extending the hyphenation dictionnary might do the trick.

It's one of those things like em dashes and curly quotes that need to be got right if e-reading is to thrive.

I agree. When em dashes are represented as -- like in Project Gutenberg it's fairly easy to turn them back into em dashes. Curly quotes isn't that easy to fix. Tried a few reg exp patterns (we use reg exp on Feedbooks to turn the text into the right format) but it always ended up pretty badly. Not sure that you can automatically turn normal quotes into curly quotes. It would be very useful if someone found the right patterns to make this work.

I am not for a moment suggesting that you reformat any of your existing ebooks, but these ideas might help improve your books in the future. But even as it is, yours are far better than some of the commercial ebooks I have seen

Tweaking some of the settings for hyphenation or adding a few reg exp would automatically reformat ALL of our e-books. Not a big deal.

There's one thing that everyone seems to forget: the most important thing is the DTD. Plain HTML is far from being the best source format: there's a structure in a book. A chapter is not some text that you align to the center of the page in a slightly bolder font. A footnote is not a link to another page. These elements could be interpreted this way by the reading system, or through the use of a stylesheet. But in the source file, they need to be treated in a different way.

[Richard Herley]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

Curly quotes isn't that easy to fix. Tried a few reg exp patterns (we use reg exp on Feedbooks to turn the text into the right format) but it always ended up pretty badly. Not sure that you can automatically turn normal quotes into curly quotes. It would be very useful if someone found the right patterns to make this work.

Thanks for the detailed response -- don't bother with the email now

I've found that the MS-Word smartquote auto-replace is no good, but there's quite a good one in Mellel. The rules for quotation marks (as opposed to apostrophes and indications of omission or elision) are quite simple -- any quote mark preceded by a new paragraph or whitespace is 99% certain to be an open-quote; the rest are close-quotes.

As for the others, the source text should be properly marked up, as follows:

` = open-single-quote
' = close-single-quote, apostrophe, and elision/omission

Faulty open-single-quotes (marked up as ' rather than ` in the source) can be found quite quickly if the dialogue is indicated by double (") rather than single (') quotes, otherwise it's a chore.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

Yes, as long as you have the language in the metadata, you can support hyphenation on the reading software.

For optimal support you do need at least enough support in your source format to be able to express hyphenation points not found by the hyphenation algorithm and to suppress hyphenation points it identifies incorrectly. The Unicode soft hyphen covers the first case, but the second needs some sort of format support.

Somewhat relevantly, has anyone else seen Prince? Beautiful (PDF) rendering from (X)HTML + CSS input, complete with hyphenation, (LaTeX-style) floats, headers, etc. I'd love see someone use their rendering engine in an e-book reader.

[Hadrien]

I'll take a look at Prince. If we ever decide to switch to something different for our PDFs on Feedbooks, it would be pretty easy... And we already generate XHTML for our EPUB output.

By the way, Star Dragon is now available on Feedbooks: http://www.feedbooks.com/discover/book/2293

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Richard Herley

As for the others, the source text should be properly marked up, as follows:

` = open-single-quote
' = close-single-quote, apostrophe, and elision/omission

I think you should mark it up with a xml-tag or a LaTeX command. In LaTeX I use \q so for example: \q{This is a quotation and \q{red} is a word.} This would automatically result in ``This is a quotation and `red' is a word'' and if the text is in Swedish the quotes are in the same direction so it would be ''Detta är ett citat och 'röd' är ett ord''.

[RockdaMan]

I found this book recommended in a "space opera" thread, and on the off-chance that the author might have offered a copy free, I found his website. There is, indeed, a free copy available. But two posts up you'll see that Feedbooks offers it for free now, though the url has changed. Here are both links:

http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2293/star-dragon
http://www.mikebrotherton.com/?page_id=8

Oh, and I knowingly ignored the old thread warning.