A few quick questions

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Although punctuation is, of course, an "editorial" decision, I personally prefer to leave the original punctuation.

I second this. The digital reproduction should be as close to the spirit of the original text as possible... weird punctuation and all!

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

I second this. The digital reproduction should be as close to the spirit of the original text as possible... weird punctuation and all!

Note that very often (especially with older works) punctuation and spelling decisions were made by the publisher and typesetter, rather than the author. And one could very well argue that "modernizing" spelling and punctuation actually keeps the spirit of the original, while maintaining old customs makes the text look outdated, which was not what the original intended

[ficbot]

Thanks so much to everyone for the feedback! I finished it. Made a simple cover in Open Office. Since it is my first book, I welcome any comments before I post the proper version. I have attached the epub file below. Any comments are welcome and then I will post the good version to the library here!

The book is called Hours of Devotion by Fanny Neuda, translated from the German by M. Mayer and was published in 1806, therefore it is in the public domain.

[SBT]

Much, much more successful than my first attempt at an epub! But you asked for feedback; I've jotted down a few things that I would have done differently. My suggested solutions are terse; I'll expand if they're unintelligible. Good, properly explained solutions are (almost certainly) to be found somewhere on this site, but excavating the thread you need is not always easy...

Presumed typos that popped up:

10. "Thou shalt not covet anything that is thy neighbor's."
Oenvy, tho

Thy will, 0(zero) all-gracious Father

– suggested solution: use a program like gutcheck.

Cover image does not scale – suggested solution: set image width:100%;

Headings/subheadings sometimes appear at bottom of page, with content on next page – suggested solution: set page-break-after:avoid; in stylesheet for h1-4. (May also have something to do with empty <div>s immediately after headings.

Hebrew text images are not centered in Adobe Digital Editions — suggested solution: Search this forum; well known problem.

Hebrew text images do not scale – suggested solution: give width either in % or em, depending on whether you wish the images to scale with display size or font size. Save images in higher resolution, and in a lossless format like png.

Hebrew text images background differs from text background – suggested solution: Use gimp/Photoshop and change background to white or transparent.

Stanzas(?) in prayers split over pages – suggested solution: create class p.stanza {page-break-inside:avoid;} See also various discussions on the forum concerning poetry.

Quotes/dashes given as "/' – suggested solution: replace by “” and ‘’

Concerning hebrew phrases embedded in the text, it is fully possible to have images in a line of text; embed the image in a span, and set the height of the image to 1em.

Finally, my personal preferences for text is to have paragraphs indented instead of separated by space, and to have it justified. But that is definitely a matter of taste.

[ficbot]

Wow, SBT, thanks! I am doing a second proofread on my ipad and found a few zeros which should be Os. I am fixing.

Question, when you say page, do you mean screen on your reader device, or am I misunderstanding? I guess I worried more about section breaks than page breaks because I assumed the pages would change depending on how the reader set their font sizes and viewing preferences.

[SBT]

Yes, by 'page' I mean 'screenful', and when I fiddle with font sizes, sometimes a heading in your book appears at the very bottom of the screen. It is no show-stopper, but it doesn't look nice.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by SBT

Hebrew text images do not scale – suggested solution: give width either in % or em, depending on whether you wish the images to scale with display size or font size. Save images in higher resolution, and in a lossless format like png.

Hebrew text images background differs from text background – suggested solution: Use gimp/Photoshop and change background to white or transparent.

Even better, redo the Hebrew using an embedded Hebrew font. It will look better and scale better.

[GMcG]

I would
- use only the name Neuda on the cover. That was her name when she published her book of prayers;
- add a titlepage with an information about the translation. (Not on the cover). Which edition was used for the translation? There is another version of the 'Hours' in a modern translation (Dinah Berland) available and the text examples given there sometimes are much different.
- control the date of publishing. When the original (German) was published in 1855, the translation cannot be of 1806;
- add your name as producer in the metadata;
- make the cover more elaborate (see example); the name of the author should have the same size as the title;
- use transparent gifs or pngs for the hebrew snippets as recommended by SBT and split shabbat.jpg into three parts (see example);
- use another formatting for the text of the prayers for children (like poetry, more centered or margin to the left;
- make each prayer a separate chapter (page-break-before), so it starts at the top of the screen;
- add some information about the author.

George

[GrannyGrump]

I took a quick skim through your epub, and congratulations on tackling this book. It has some complications for a first project. I sent you a PM with some comments, hope they help.