Meet the Author and FREE Steven Lake title up

[QIbHom]

Originally Posted by Robertb

Did you try both: www.MyEZread.com and www.EZread.com? Both are still working.

Both blocked by my employer. Just letting you know. Other e-book stores aren't blocked. Unless a bunch of us Feddies start complaining, it isn't anything to worry about.

My guess is you have a link to an advertiser service or something that they block by default, but I can't verify that without talking to the firewall guys, and I don't have them buttered up yet.

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by Steven Lake

Well, is there any easy way to fix that? This hasn't come up as a problem until just now.

I wish that I could help out, but I am not really much of an expert in the best practices for building good specification compliant EPUB documents. I have looked inside of some other EPUB books just now and I did not come across other instances where both UTF-8 and windows-1252 charset specifiers were included, so I brought that up as a *possible* cause of the differences in EPUB display on different readers. That may be actually be OK, but I do not know enough to say. I just have not noticed something like that before. There are some very knowledgeable people in some of the specialized forums here, so maybe someone from "Writers' Corner", "Calibre", or the "Sigil" forum may be able to explain how the EPUB display of "The Oort Perimeter" is coming up with quotes that do not display correctly on all EPUB readers?

[tmclough]

I just downloaded it (from EZRead; Linux (Kubuntu 10.04), Firefox, FlashGot extension); unrar'ed it; and copied it (drag & drop with Dolphin file manager) to my PocketPRO; and I have no problem reading "s and 's.

Did you (the people with a problem with those characters) do any sort of conversion, with Calibre or other software, before reading? How did you copy it to your PocketPRO (drag & drop, Calibre, ADE, etc.)?

[Steven Lake]

Yeah, I'm also curious how UTF-8 and Win-1252 characters could even be in the same file. Wouldn't a simple standardizing of the file remove all that?

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Steven Lake

Yeah, I'm also curious how UTF-8 and Win-1252 characters could even be in the same file. Wouldn't a simple standardizing of the file remove all that?

There should only be one coding for the whole eBook. All the files should agree.

Dale

[theducks]

Originally Posted by tmclough

I just downloaded it (from EZRead; Linux (Kubuntu 10.04), Firefox, FlashGot extension); unrar'ed it; and copied it (drag & drop with Dolphin file manager) to my PocketPRO; and I have no problem reading "s and 's.

Did you (the people with a problem with those characters) do any sort of conversion, with Calibre or other software, before reading? How did you copy it to your PocketPRO (drag & drop, Calibre, ADE, etc.)?

I simply Un-RAR'd the file and viewed it with epub-reader (firefox plugin), dropped onto my reader.

I used WinRAR on XP and "Archive Manager" on Ubuntu Lucid.
No conversion. (Calibre Conversion did not fix, either) These are curlly Quotes, open and close
Strange. I have basic USA English configurations.

[tmclough]

Originally Posted by theducks

I simply Un-RAR'd the file and viewed it with epub-reader (firefox plugin), dropped onto my reader.

I used WinRAR on XP and "Archive Manager" on Ubuntu Lucid.
No conversion. (Calibre Conversion did not fix, either) These are curlly Quotes, open and close
Strange. I have basic USA English configurations.

I should have specified that what I see are curly "s and 's, both directions. I also tried it under 3 ebook readers I have installed under Kubuntu (Calibre, FBReader, and Okular), all three see things normally. (Okular sees the quotes as non-curly, but they're still quotes.)


That said, I seem to have noticed a different formatting problem, one that can be confusing and/or annoying to some people, myself included. That problem is a lack of scene breaks (usually a blank line within a chapter). I haven't finished reading chapter 1 yet, but I've already noticed a couple of places in that chapter where I believe there should be a blank line, but there isn't. Upon looking at the source code to the chapter, I noticed that at both locations where I thought there should be an empty line, there were two empty lines, but no formatting to indicate that there should be an empty line. In other words, there's a break in the source code, but not in the final product.

Is this a human error, a software bug (in the creation process), or something else? Assuming that every such scene change is the same (paragraph before ends with </p>; two blank lines; new paragraph starts with <p class="calibre1">), then it shouldn't be too much work for a nerd like me to figure out how to edit every file to fix it for me; however, other people may have the same problem and not have the knowhow to fix it on their own.

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

There should only be one coding for the whole eBook. All the files should agree.

Dale

This is the view of a sample page containing both UTF-8 and windows-1252 code page declarations.

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="CONTENT-TYPE" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"/>
    <title>Earth Fleet - Book 1</title>
    <meta content="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"/><link href="stylesheet.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet"/><style type="text/css">
		@page { margin-bottom: 5.000000pt; margin-top: 5.000000pt; }</style></head>
  <body class="calibre">
<p class="dedication" id="calibre_pb_1">
Author's Note</p>

<p class="calibre1">This
novel is book 1 of the “Earthfleet” saga, the first of
three sagas that make up the “Bitter Cycles of Man”
series.  To learn more about this series, or other books that I've
written, or are in progress, go to:<a href="http://www.realmsofimagination.net">www.realmsofimagination.net</a></p>

</body>
</html>

This is a sample of how the page is rendered in my three previously mentioned web browsers, EPUBREADER, and in Sigil.

Author's Note

This novel is book 1 of the “Earthfleet� saga, the first of three sagas that make up the “Bitter Cycles of Man� series. To learn more about this series, or other books that I've written, or are in progress, go to:www.realmsofimagination.net

[Steven Lake]

Hmm, might have to crack that open and look at it by hand. Dreams helped me with the conversion, so I might need to have him look it over again. And you're right. There are no scene breaks. Not sure where those went to. Never noticed that before.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Steven Lake

Hmm, might have to crack that open and look at it by hand. Dreams helped me with the conversion, so I might need to have him look it over again. And you're right. There are no scene breaks. Not sure where those went to. Never noticed that before.

The MR Astak Forum -- Your QA department

Have you tried Sigil .2-RC2 ?

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by theducks

Have you tried Sigil .2-RC2 ?

I just opened Steve's book in Sigil 0.2RC2, and during Sigil's clean up operation on initially opening the book, Sigil removed all windows-1252 code page declarations and just declared the UTF-8 code page. That made the quotes problem permanent, so the curly quotes being used in the book must have been taken from the windows-1252 code page?????

This is what the page that I sampled previously looks like after Sigil filters and imports the EPUB.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
  <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="CONTENT-TYPE" />

  <title>Earth Fleet - Book 1</title>
  <meta content="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type" />
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="../Styles/stylesheet.css" type="text/css" />
  
<style type="text/css">
@page { margin-bottom: 5.000000pt; margin-top: 5.000000pt; }
</style>
</head>

<body class="calibre">
  <p class="dedication" id="calibre_pb_1">Author's Note</p>

  <p class="calibre1">This novel is book 1 of the “Earthfleet� saga, the first of three sagas that make up the “Bitter Cycles of Man� series. To learn more about this series, or other books that I've written, or are in progress, go to:<a href="http://www.realmsofimagination.net">www.realmsofimagination.net</a></p>
</body>
</html>

[theducks]

AH!
This is why I never saw the windows-1252
I Sigil'd (.2B3) it initially after seeing the problem. (auto - clean out)

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by theducks

AH!
This is why I never saw the windows-1252
I Sigil'd (.2B3) it initially after seeing the problem. (auto - clean out)

Yeah, I think that I recall Valloric mentioning that all input into Sigil is run through HTML Tidy to clean it up when the EPUB is first opened. I think that he mentioned that it was a good idea NOT to cut and paste into Sigil because that would bypass the HTML Tidy cleanup. In this case though, HTML Tidy seems to have masked what may be the cause of the curly quotes problem.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Dave_S

Yeah, I think that I recall Valloric mentioning that all input into Sigil is run through HTML Tidy to clean it up when the EPUB is first opened. I think that he mentioned that it was a good idea NOT to cut and paste into Sigil because that would bypass the HTML Tidy cleanup. In this case though, HTML Tidy seems to have masked what may be the cause of the curly quotes problem.

I just confirmed that it was Sigil that brought the issue to light.

I replaced the copy I had in Calibre with an un-touched version... Curly Quotes appear

Nasty feature

I have been in the habit of tweaking margins and indents to make good use of the PEz screen area for my old eyes.
I use Left-Margin 2em, right Margin 16em (to leave room for EPUB page numbers. Paragraph indent 1em (is plenty )

[Steven Lake]

Well, one thing I definitely need to do is get around to learning how to do the formatting on ebooks anyways, so this may just be an even greater motivation to do that so that I avoid issues like this. ^_^;;

I'll see what I can do to get cleaned up versions and then simply resubmit those when I get done.