Philosophy Okakura, Kakuzō: The Book of Tea. v1. 00 Sep 2010

The Book of Tea (茶の本) was written by Okakura Kakuzo and was first published in 1906. Its subtitle is: A Japanese Harmony of Art, Culture and the Simple Life

The text is taken from William Adams' TeX showcase version from the TeX Users Group.

The embedded font is Sorts Mill Goudy from The Crud Factory.

Steven Hall

This work is assumed to be in the Life+70 public domain OR the copyright holder has given specific permission for distribution. Copyright laws differ throughout the world, and it may still be under copyright in some countries. Before downloading, please check your country's copyright laws. If the book is under copyright in your country, do not download or redistribute this work.

To report a copyright violation you can contact us here.

[jgaiser]

Interestingly, this nor your recently posted Owl Creek epub will open on my Nook. Nook displays "Opening your ebook" message but never actually displays book.

Blarg! All computer products and software are useless. It's just that some are less useless than others.

All I can say is that I checked it on: Kobo reader, Adobe ADE, Calibre, Sigil, and the Firefox epubreader add-on. Had I a Nook I'd have tried that too.

I did a search on your "Opening your ebook" freeze problem and saw complaints that it happens but no real solutions.

The O'Reilly publishing people complained that their Nook wouldn't read many of their books and a commenter pointed out (as of early July) that the update to the latest firmware solved that problem.

The Barnes and Noble forum pointed out a solution that only works if you loaded the file via their software.

I'll do a little more digging but I'm not sure what could be the issue. Sorry that it doesn't work for you.

[jgaiser]

Don't apologize.. Really.. It does work just fine in Calibre. It works on my Kindle when converted (though probably not as pretty). Just a heads up. Let me know if you want to test it on a Nook.

[itagthewind]

I've got a Nook. Just tried it. Downloaded and uploaded it twice. Failed both times.

[ldolse]

Checked it out with Sigil's epub validation - it doesn't like the fact that the SVG cover is a child of body (though that's not exactly the error give). Wrapping the cover in <div></div> tags removed the error.

No idea if that's the cause of the crash (don't have a nook), but it's a simple fix if it is.

Sigil/Flightcrew also threw warnings (not errors) that the fonts and background images were manifested but unused. They are used, but in the css instead of the html. I'm not sure if that's a Flightcrew issue or if the use embedded fonts/images in css in that particular manner isn't officially blessed.

[WillAdams]

I'm flattered I think. I wish you'd asked for the text though --- I'm pretty sure I still have it handy and it'd've had at least some basic markup, esp. italics which might've saved you some effort.

I will note that I used the Project Gutenberg text back at a time when they had rather tedious legal notification requirements, and since it was originally intended merely as a gift for my sister --- since then, I managed to get the couple of corrections I had submitted to and accepted by PG (though they chose not to honour the original's British spelling style) --- not sure if there've been any changes since then, but in case there have been, you should probably switch to that text (unless you like the British spelling style).

Nice edition though! (And those who're curious may find it educational to compare my .pdf w/ this ePub version to see the sort of typographic infelicities which even in the best ePub version can't be controlled for --- one word last lines, # of lines on a page constantly changing to prevent widows / orphans, overly loose line on the middle of pg. 20, 3 word stack on pg. 21 (meditation/Meditation), 2 word stack on pg. 32 (black), 2 word stack on pg. 37 (the) Twice!, six word river on pg. 40 (the/their/the/the/its/we), 2 word stacks on pg. 40 (a & We), 3 word stack on pg. 46 (the/the/The), 2 word stack on pg. 47 (a), awkward break at the bottom of the first page of Chapter VII where the poem is referred to, but appears on the following page (when viewed in Sony's ebook viewing program)). In the .pdf I believe there were only one or two places where I let two word stacks stand (because they were intractable) --- will have to try again using xetex and margin protrusion and character expansion (I'd used DEK's macro for hanging punctuation from _The TeXbook_).

Was it intentional that only the first lines of verse be set in italics? I'd thought that all of the lines were... Also, I had book titles in italics (as per the original and typographic tradition), but you seem to've put them in quotes --- was there a particular reason for that?

William

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

Nice edition though! (And those who're curious may find it educational to compare my .pdf w/ this ePub version to see the sort of typographic infelicities which even in the best ePub version can't be controlled for --- one word last lines, # of lines on a page constantly changing to prevent widows / orphans, overly loose line on the middle of pg. 20, 3 word stack on pg. 21 (meditation/Meditation), 2 word stack on pg. 32 (black), 2 word stack on pg. 37 (the) Twice!, six word river on pg. 40 (the/their/the/the/its/we), 2 word stacks on pg. 40 (a & We), 3 word stack on pg. 46 (the/the/The), 2 word stack on pg. 47 (a), awkward break at the bottom of the first page of Chapter VII where the poem is referred to, but appears on the following page (when viewed in Sony's ebook viewing program)).

Those problems are not intrinsic to ePUB, but are all the fault of the reading software. There's no reason why a reading software could not use some more sophisticate algorithms to break lines and layout "pages" (except that they may be hard to program and resource intensive), instead of the simplistic ones they use. And note that an ePUB is designed to be reflowable, meaning it can be reformatted on-the-fly by changing the font type or size, or the device orientation... so rivers, stacks, widows, pagebreaks, etc. will all change, and it's impossible to control them all. It's like creating a single .tex file that must give a good output for whatever page or font size a user may choose, you can't use hand tweaks there.

[WillAdams]

Believe me, when I tell you that there is no automated typesetting system which can detect stacks and rivers and successfully eliminate them --- moreover, there will not be such a system until such time as fully artificial intelligence comes into existence (and I mean something beyond sophisticated pattern-matching as evidenced by IBM's recent _Jeopardy_ publicity stunt). Every attempt which I've seen which tries to remove stacks gets stuck in endless loops where it can neither remove the stack nor break the paragraph nicely.

I noted specifically in my reply that ePubs re-flow and that the infelicities I referred to would be seen in only a specific viewer implementation, so I don't see why you bring that up.

The bottom line is that for the foreseeable future one has either:

- reflowable text w/ bad paragraph and page breaking

or

- nicely formatted pages which require human attention to create

William

[Coops]

Thanks - love the formatting (the drop caps and chapter heading etc).
I've converted it to use my preferred Fontin font - wish I could apply this same layout to the rest of my epubs...

Coops

[ghostyjack]

Great book this, glad I've downloaded it.

Got one issue with it though. I've opened it in EPUBReader (the firefox plugin) and the drop cap at the start of each chapter appears to start from the second line and not the first.

Also I've noticed a strange behaviour with the font when using EPUBReader: if I click on the side to initiate a page-turn and it opens a new chapter I get a different font than if I click on the heading name in the TOC.

I've attached a couple of pictures here as well to explain what I'm referring to.

I would have posted this in the EPUBReader section but I only get this with your book.

This work is assumed to be in the Life+70 public domain OR the copyright holder has given specific permission for distribution. Copyright laws differ throughout the world, and it may still be under copyright in some countries. Before downloading, please check your country's copyright laws. If the book is under copyright in your country, do not download or redistribute this work.

To report a copyright violation you can contact us here.