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Old 11-09-2013, 10:44 PM   #136
Tex2002ans
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Originally Posted by Jellby View Post
Depends on the font, but there certainly exist bold smallcaps fonts (and italic smallcaps, although that's something LaTeX does not like)
Yeah, I have run into italic smallcaps in a few books, and I do it just like the method above (just add font-style: italic; to my smallcaps class)

Speaking of LaTeX, do you have any good tutorials on it?

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Originally Posted by Jellby View Post
Code:
<p class="noindent"><span class="smallcaps">International problems</span>, economic as well as political, [...]

span.smallcaps {
font-variant: small-caps;
}
and then in the .xpgt, which is only visible to ADE, add:

Code:
<ade:template xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:ade="http://ns.adobe.com/2006/ade" xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format">
  <ade:style>
    <ade:styling-rule selector="span.caps" font-weight="bold"/>
  </ade:style>
</ade:template>
which is the equivalent of:

Code:
span.smallcaps {
font-weight: bold;
}
(or underlined, or grey background, or whatever style we want to replace the smallcaps with in ADE).
Genius. That is probably around the same code I would have figured out after tinkering with it tonight... now I won't have to!

I might have to start doing this, and then begin implementing in all future books/revisions.

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Originally Posted by Hitch View Post
EXCEPT, of course, you can't use Charis on Amazon, if the ePUB is destined to go there. Just noting, FWIW.
Good to know, I did not know this. Although I try to avoid embedding fonts if at all possible (I think it bloats the EPUB, and my goals are accurate text/minimal code/easy transferability than getting a certain "look").

Quick question, how do you guys at work deal with a book with lots of accented greek characters?

I did a post a while back asking this question + a sample (all greek words marked with a "greek" CSS class): https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=213688

Side Note: I am still loving this tornado we stirred up of information. Psymon has started a lot of influential ideas and raising the quality of lots of books from the discussion in this thread.
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Old 11-10-2013, 03:36 AM   #137
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Originally Posted by Tex2002ans View Post
Speaking of LaTeX, do you have any good tutorials on it?
Well, there's The not so Short Introduction to LaTeX, but it's a bit outdated.
If you are starting any project now, I'd use the memoir class (long juicy manual), and of course UTF-8 input (no need to write "\'{\i}" when you can just write "í" )

By the way, this thread needs a serious cleanup and splitting into different topics
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Old 11-10-2013, 04:23 AM   #138
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Has Amazon rejected one of your clients' books because Charis SIL was embedded?
No, it simply replaces it. Altogether. No point in using it.
I didn't know this, thanks!

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Originally Posted by Tex2002ans View Post
Quick question, how do you guys at work deal with a book with lots of accented greek characters?
If you're digitizing an existing book, you could save a lot of time copying and pasting using:
As for the display, I like Galatia SIL, which is relatively small and features all required glyphs as regular and bold characters.

(No font embedding is required for Kindles, because the default fonts support all accented Greek characters.)

BTW, Sigil's RegEx engine supports searching for characters by Unicode script name; therefore it's relatively easy to search for all Greek characters and wrap them in <span> tags.

Find: ([\p{Greek}| ]{2,})
Replace: <span class="greek">\1</span>

Because of the very simple design of the RegEx, it'll also match spaces immediately before and after Greek text and double spaces, but it's still much faster than manually marking up Greek text.
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Old 11-10-2013, 04:33 AM   #139
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Yeah, you gave those same exact sites in that topic I linked to! I still have them open in my Firefox tabs from all those months ago!

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Originally Posted by Doitsu View Post
BTW, Sigil's RegEx engine supports searching for characters by Unicode script name; therefore it's relatively easy to search for all Greek characters and wrap them in <span> tags.

Find: ([\p{Greek}| ]{2,})
Replace: <span class="greek">\1</span>

Because of the very simple design of the RegEx, it'll also match spaces immediately before and after Greek text and double spaces, but it's still much faster than manually marking up Greek text.
Great, I will also have to toss this into my Sigil Regex list. I haven't run into a book with lots of greek characters in months (thank the FSM! Those were a complete pain to OCR)... but when I did, I was using the Sigil - Report - Characters in HTML Files to spot all the greek characters.
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Old 11-11-2013, 10:15 AM   #140
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Omigod, I miss a few days and there's, like, a thousand messages to wade through (again).

Going back to this, though, I was asking about where -- in addition to the iBooks Store -- I could also try to sell my book since it seems I managed to get it working fairly okay in ADE, too...

Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf View Post
You can publish your ePub with Barnes & Noble and Kobo. You could also try a direct ePub upload to Smashwords, but Smashwords is a crap shoot if it will be accepted there.
I have a couple of questions here, one related to selling, and another related to design issues...

I just took a look at the Smashwords site (I'd never heard of them before you mentioned them), and it would seem that if you can get in there then they distribute it to iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and countless other places, too. I already managed to get my account set up with Apple, so I could do that on my own/directly, of course, but how do others go about the business of "selling"?

Like, is the best way to try to go direct and set up separate individual accounts with all these different places, or is it better -- or, at least, easier -- to go through an aggregate like Smashwords and let them handle all the paperwork? I've never been much for accounting, and the last thing I need is to have to start keeping ledgers.

Also, on the design side, in creating this first epub of mine my initial thought was to basically just publish on the iBooks Store -- since at first I was only able to get my design to work correctly in that platform. That's all thankfully changed now, but the way I'd created it was pretty much that it looked best when viewed in two-page landscape mode. Not that one "had" to view it that way, of course, but doing so gave it some nice things -- for example, I have a frontispiece opposite my title page.

I don't know how other ereaders display books -- apart from iBooks, do others have the option for a two-page viewing mode? I guess I'm just wondering about that nicety of my frontispiece (and other "little niceties" that I incorporated), or if I should, say, scrap the frontispiece, etc. for certain platforms and be designing a whole slew of different versions of my book to sell in different places.

ANY thoughts on the above would be most welcome and appreciated!
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Old 11-11-2013, 10:29 AM   #141
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Re giving out a free copy of my book (once it's finished) to say "thank you" to those of you who have been so helpful here...

Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch View Post
Well, if you put it up somewhere and run a free-day promotion, you should let the MR'ers know, so that they can obtain a copy, or PM some of the people here who helped you immeasurably, on this and other threads,
Oh, that's certainly a thought, to do it like that. I could do a "free day", as you say, although I also understand that once my book is up on the iBooks store that I apparently get a bunch of "coupons" that I can give out to people, so that they can get it for free? My understanding is that this is meant for review purposes, but surely I could give out those coupons as "thankyous" instead.

Quote:
and give them one in a format that they can use.
Well, for starters, I was going to get my book on the iBooks Store -- and my plan, originally, was to then get to work on my second (and different, and definitely easier) project.

I just don't know now what to do next -- I could either do that, and start my other project, or else try to get my first book out there in other ways (whether Barnes & Noble, etc. etc. etc., or else try to get together some kind of simpler MOBI version to sell on amazon).

In any case, though, I'd be more than happy to do make a copy of the one up on the iBooks Store available for free download to those of you who have been so helpful here -- but for starters, anyway, that might be the only place to get it.

If that doesn't work for you, all I can do is say I'm truly sorry -- at least, until I get it up (sooner or later) elsewhere. :/

Quote:
That isn't me trying to mooch one, to be clear; I wasn't helpful. However, there are a few people here who were. Just a thought.
Oh, you've been very, very helpful, Hitch! I'd be delighted to share a copy of my book with you, too! If, of course, I ever get the damn thing finished and out there.
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Old 11-11-2013, 10:53 AM   #142
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Originally Posted by Hitch View Post
EXCEPT, of course, you can't use Charis on Amazon, if the ePUB is destined to go there. Just noting, FWIW.

Hitch
I did download a sample recently that contained Charis SIL as the embedded font. So if Charis SIL is not allowed, then why was I able to download a sample that has Charis SIL embedded?

The eBook sample I downloaded is from the latest Star Wars eBook.

http://www.amazon.com/Razors-Edge-St...4184829&sr=1-4
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Old 11-11-2013, 02:47 PM   #143
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Originally Posted by JSWolf View Post
I did download a sample recently that contained Charis SIL as the embedded font. So if Charis SIL is not allowed, then why was I able to download a sample that has Charis SIL embedded?

The eBook sample I downloaded is from the latest Star Wars eBook.

http://www.amazon.com/Razors-Edge-St...4184829&sr=1-4
Wolfie:

Well, firstly, I suspect that that book went through the FTP, not the KDP. (Publisher books are sent via FTP, unlike self-pubs, which go through the KDP). Secondly, here's part of what I know about this:


Quote:
Section 3.1.6, Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines: Publishers can include their own font for their content. Amazon has a quality assurance process to ensure that these fonts display well on e Ink-based devices and do not impair the reading experience. Do not include the Charis font; it is replaced with a higher quality font in the Kindle Readers.
...and the other part is, when we've tried it, it bollixes up. We've even tried a supposedly new and improved version of Charis, and no joy. I don't remember (and I asked the person here who has the most experience with it, and she doesn't remember, either) exactly what happened, but it came out weird. We also don't remember if it was weird after KP and before KDP, or after KDP. If I had to guess, I'd say that latter, as that is where we've encountered most of our issues.

If a publisher can upload a book that does not go through KDP, it's entirely possible, I suppose, that the Charis doesn't get supplanted, but that's not my understanding as to what Amazon has said, either indirectly via the Guidelines or directly to me in email. My clear comprehension is that they just swap out the font, for whatever reason.

Knowing you, Wolfie, I assume you ripped the book apart, and confirmed that the font you were seeing was Charis? Here's the part I don't know, because we're not publishers, so I don't have a way to do a complete test, start-to-finish: I don't know if the Charis is literally replaced or simply a different font displays. I suspect it's just that a different font displays, so even ripping something apart mayn't give us a clue. The somewhat "passive voice" statement of the Guide isn't really clear as to precisely what they mean, and I haven't gotten greater clarification in my inquiries, because quite honestly, it wasn't that important to us--it was more "confirm this font doesn't work," "check" "okay, don't use that font," and that was a while back, shortly after the K8 format came into being.

Sorry--can't help more than that.

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Old 11-11-2013, 07:43 PM   #144
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I did a Tweak book on the sample and yes, the font is Charis SIL. But, it's been subset. What I am woondering though is if you rename Charis SIL in a font editor, subset it and embed it, will Amazon know it's actual Charis SIL since there is really no way to easily tell. Amazon would have to program something to look at the actual letters and see if it is Charis SIL and then monkey with it from there.

I'm guessing that Amazon doesn't like Charis SIL because it is a better font then the default font they use.
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Old 11-11-2013, 08:38 PM   #145
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Or there is a bug in their software they can't find or don't want to fix that blows up only on Charis.

You know what they used to say about Ma Bell, "We don't care, we don't have to."
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Old 11-11-2013, 10:09 PM   #146
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Or there is a bug in their software they can't find or don't want to fix that blows up only on Charis.
A number of people on MR are using my modified Charis SIL without issue. Also, if there was a problem with Charis SIL. I've seen Charis SIL Modified used on a Kindle Touch and I've never seen or even heard of a problem with it. In fact, it does look pretty good.
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Old 11-12-2013, 01:31 AM   #147
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Or there is a bug in their software they can't find or don't want to fix that blows up only on Charis.
IMHO, it's more likely that they don't like the fact that adding Charis SIL will significantly increase the size of a book without adding much value, and since Amazon needs to host all the books on their servers and server space costs money they most likely don't want publisher to embed full font sets, regardless of the font.

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Originally Posted by JSWolf View Post
I'm guessing that Amazon doesn't like Charis SIL because it is a better font then the default font they use.
Charis SIL is a nice font, but, IMHO, it's not better than the default serif font, Caecilia, which has been optimized for eInk displays.
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Old 11-12-2013, 03:50 AM   #148
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I just took a look at the Smashwords site (I'd never heard of them before you mentioned them), and it would seem that if you can get in there then they distribute it to iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and countless other places, too. I already managed to get my account set up with Apple, so I could do that on my own/directly, of course, but how do others go about the business of "selling"?
I do not know anything about selling e-books, since I create them for my own pleasure and some others. However, I do know that you do not want to come near to Smashwords...
You upload your Word document and puts it through their product called Meatgrinder and boy, what a fitting name. You never end up with a product you would like (especially with your wishes) and tons of errors. And, don't forget, no change of fixing those in the ePUB.
Just do a quick search here on Smashwords and/or Meatgrinder...
I heard that they apparently now also allow upload of ePUB, but I would not trust them with it.
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Old 11-12-2013, 05:18 AM   #149
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I do not know anything about selling e-books, since I create them for my own pleasure and some others. However, I do know that you do not want to come near to Smashwords...

[...]

Just do a quick search here on Smashwords and/or Meatgrinder...
I heard that they apparently now also allow upload of ePUB, but I would not trust them with it.
I second this... I have heard horrible things about Smashwords. And if I remember correctly from other posts on the forums, even perfectly compliant/clean EPUBs from Hitch's company had horror stories trying to go through Smashwords. (Perhaps Hitch can chime in with updated/recent experiences?)

They are mostly a company that deals with Word documents, and you have to strip/adhere to their VERY STRICTLY STYLED requirements. Recently, they have made a way to directly submit EPUBs that is in "beta": http://www.smashwords.com/swdirect

I shudder to think what Smashwords would do to a document/EPUB like yours, where you are taking advantage of complex font ligatures and CSS.

Best bet for your book would be to figure it out, get it working nicely in ADE, and submitting it to the stores directly.

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Originally Posted by Psymon View Post
Like, is the best way to try to go direct and set up separate individual accounts with all these different places, or is it better -- or, at least, easier -- to go through an aggregate like Smashwords and let them handle all the paperwork? I've never been much for accounting, and the last thing I need is to have to start keeping ledgers.
Just know that Smashwords takes out a percentage cut of the revenue as well, so that is less % in your pocket. That is up to you to weigh the costs/benefits of their "ease of use/collections" + most likely destroying your EPUB, versus you getting the full money from sales.

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Also, on the design side, in creating this first epub of mine my initial thought was to basically just publish on the iBooks Store -- since at first I was only able to get my design to work correctly in that platform. That's all thankfully changed now, but the way I'd created it was pretty much that it looked best when viewed in two-page landscape mode.
Most devices are not as large as the iPad, and most ereaders are going to be read vertically (not landscape) as single pages.

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Originally Posted by Psymon View Post
I guess I'm just wondering about that nicety of my frontispiece (and other "little niceties" that I incorporated), or if I should, say, scrap the frontispiece, etc. for certain platforms and be designing a whole slew of different versions of my book to sell in different places.
I would keep everything in, but just keep in mind with the design, that it will not always be possible to view two pages together side-by-side.

"different versions for different places"...... that, to me, is a huge pain. Imagine you find a typo and want to make a fix. Now instead of fixing it in one spot, you must fix the same thing in three, four, five+ EPUBs. Then you have to make sure you actually did the fix in X, Y, Z versions, and you have to make sure that you update the right version to the right store, etc. etc.

It is a method that some people do... but it will cause you A LOT of overhead (and pain and suffering ).

AT MOST, I would recommend keeping two different versions. One for iBooks (taking advantage of the complex CSS), and one for all the other EPUB devices + being fed through KindleGen.

MAYBE in your special case, there might be a third EPUB, made specifically for KindleGen, where you have images of your "olde" half of the book, with fallback code to display the images in the old Kindles.

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Originally Posted by Psymon View Post
Re giving out a free copy of my book (once it's finished) to say "thank you" to those of you who have been so helpful here...
My eyes hurt from too much of the "ye olde" text.

As a side note... is there a forum you frequent where everyone writes in Middle English?
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Old 11-12-2013, 08:22 AM   #150
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Thanks to Toxaris, too, for your thoughts on this! I'll respond to Tex2002ans' follow-up comments here...

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Originally Posted by Tex2002ans View Post
I second this... I have heard horrible things about Smashwords. And if I remember correctly from other posts on the forums, even perfectly compliant/clean EPUBs from Hitch's company had horror stories trying to go through Smashwords.
Sounds like good advice for someone like me (if not most people here) -- I don't need someone else completely ruining all my efforts, never mind rewarding them for doing so with a percentage of the nominal sales I'll probably have anyway. From the sounds of it, "Smashwords" sounds like a rather apt name for them -- I suppose "smashbooks" was probably already taken.

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Best bet for your book would be to figure it out, get it working nicely in ADE, and submitting it to the stores directly.
Thanks entirely to all the discussions here, I think I've actually gotten my epub to look good in both iBooks and ADE -- indeed, pretty much exactly the same, in fact! So for that I don't even need two versions, I have just one.

The biggest difference -- from what little I know about non-iBooks readers -- would probably be what you said here...

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Most devices are not as large as the iPad, and most ereaders are going to be read vertically (not landscape) as single pages.
I guess there's not much I can do about that, and there's a couple of spots in my book where there's "redundant" pages with full-page images (for example, the frontispiece), but not too many at all, and hopefully these will still provide some kind of additional, "non-literary" appeal to my book anyway. I hope.

All this discussion here really has been a huge eye-opener for me, though -- virtually everyone I know (family and friends) who have an ereader all have iPads (and iPhones), I don't know anyone at all that has a Kindle or any other reader. Obviously I shouldn't be just designing for only my family and friends, but I really had no idea just how relatively UN-popular the iPad is.

And on that note, actually, I realize that so much of this technology is still fairly new, but the inability of some of these readers to display even basic typography (let alone graphics) is so discouraging, it's like what the internet was before the World Wide Web (and graphics) were available -- if anyone else out there (besides me) is old enough to remember that -- i.e. just plain text, like it was typed on an old manual typewriter, with horridly plain headings and blue, underlined "links" and stuff. I'm seriously wondering if I should just not bother at all with trying to design for "backwards compatibility", it's so "backwards" -- and surely it's only a matter of time before all those simpler readers become passé and are able to display what the iPad (and other readers) can.

It's just a matter of time, I'm sure -- and based on how VERY quickly things went in a similar regard with web design back in the 1990s, I would suspect that that's actually right around the corner. Pretty soon, I'm sure, our landfills will be filled with millions upon millions of these older, crappier readers... but that's another thought (and a very depressing one). :/

Quote:
"different versions for different places"...... that, to me, is a huge pain. Imagine you find a typo and want to make a fix. Now instead of fixing it in one spot, you must fix the same thing in three, four, five+ EPUBs. Then you have to make sure you actually did the fix in X, Y, Z versions, and you have to make sure that you update the right version to the right store, etc. etc.
That's why I'm soooooo very glad that I've gotten my design to work nicely in both iBooks and ADE -- if nothing else. I'm really just not sure what to do about/for amazon, though -- I need to explore that a little more, I guess, but I have a feeling that I'll have to totally "dumb down" my work to virtually a plain-text version in order to get it to work and be backwards compatible there. I just don't know... yet. I'll have to look into this more, but for now, first things first.

Quote:
AT MOST, I would recommend keeping two different versions. One for iBooks (taking advantage of the complex CSS), and one for all the other EPUB devices + being fed through KindleGen.
See, even this is news to me, I still have so much to learn. Does KindleGen actually do conversions of books, like, I could take my EPUB file and run it through there and convert it to MOBI format? I thought it was just a "generator" for running the previewer program so you can test out your books... or something.

I don't know -- I guess all that info must be on their site (or here in these forums). I'll take a look into that... later.

Quote:
MAYBE in your special case, there might be a third EPUB, made specifically for KindleGen, where you have images of your "olde" half of the book, with fallback code to display the images in the old Kindles.
I just don't know enough about Kindle yet, but from my minimal understanding I was under the impression that I might have to totally scrap the entire second half (the "olde" half) of my book -- not to mention any/all images -- in order to get it to work on Kindle and actually be backwards-compatible for earlier versions. But I just don't know yet if that's the case -- and I don't know if I'd be willing to do that, scrap what all is, to me, half of the appeal of my book (i.e. not just the "words" written in it, but the presentation of those words).

Quote:
My eyes hurt from too much of the "ye olde" text.


Like I've said, the first half of my book is all in plain modern text, and the same as the second, "olde" half -- this latter is really kind-of for fun, a sort of "ode" of mine to early typography and stuff (a long-time interest and passion of mine).

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As a side note... is there a forum you frequent where everyone writes in Middle English?
No, not at all, this "olde" version of my book came about after I'd rather inadvertently come across an old (1950s) scholarly book on the transition of English writing from middle English to modern English -- which essentially came about when the first English Bible was printed back in the mid-16th century. That book was full of examples of writing from that entire time, and through that is how I came up with all the spellings, etc. for the words. There's very little consistency beyond the mere basics during that period -- people kinda just made it up as they went along, since there simply wasn't any real consistent way of writing/spelling -- but at the same time there were many "patterns" that one could see, and this latter helped alot in some cases where I had words in my original, modern text that I had no 16th century equivalent of, and pretty much had to come up with how those words probably would have been spelled at the time.

It was quite a chore, believe me -- I hope I never do something like that again.

Last edited by Psymon; 11-12-2013 at 08:33 AM.
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