PRS-500 New tool: BBeB Binder

[airlik]

Originally Posted by FangornUK

Just a suggestion on formatting, I've noticed you create BBeBs with formatting for paragraphs that follows the Web page version, i.e. with a new line between paragraphs. Most ebooks skip this and simply start on a newline, it does look better.

Another one of those things that would make a great checkbox - I prefer to have the space between paragraphs...

[ptrourke]

Originally Posted by cmumford

Yeah I was concerned about plays, and how to algorithmically differentiate them from text that should reflow. I looked at Dido Queene of Carthage and it has commas at the end of most of the lines. I'm sure that over the centuries there have been a ton of different styles used, and it's going to be quite a challenge to get this right.

Don't do it algorithmically, have a check mark for "Verse" (for poetry, and plays written in verse). Dido Queen of Carthage has very defined line endings (the lines are strongly end-stopped), thus the commas, but that's a peculiarity of Marlowe's early verse style, and not typical of other verse.

Originally Posted by cmumford

I noticed that at the beginning of each paragraph there are names like _Cloan._ and _Iar._. Do you know what these mean?

Those are speech assignments - they tell you who speaks the next lines. In the case of Dido, Iar. is Iarbos, who is in love with Dido, and Cloan. is Cloanthes. You can have speech assignments either before the first line of a speech, or at the beginning of that line. The cleanest typesetters tend to put the speech assignments in the margin to the left of the first line, but putting them before the first line with a dividing space before and after, like this:

HAMLET

To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
or take arm against a sea of troubles,
and by opposing, end them.

Also be aware of stage directions, which should ideally be formatted differently (i.e., bracketed in square brackets, which is what I'd do with plain text, or italicized).

Someone asked about widowing: that's something that has to be done by the display device (i.e, the Sony Reader), not the book formatter, unless there's some kind of style information for each book that includes the option of turning on and off widow and orphan support (I haven't seen the BBeB format raw yet, so I don't know if the Sony Reader has such style information).

[cmumford]

Originally Posted by FangornUK

Not sure if you know about GutenMark but I'd suggest you look at this for Gutenberg text files, it really is the best for converting into HTML - Gutenberg themselves recommend it. Easiest way would be to simply call it instead of spending your time implementing its functionality into BBeBinder, but at least the source code would really help.

Thanks a bunch for that reference. If that works then I'll definately do that instead of my own formatting since that's a really hard problem to solve and one that I'm not very interested in doing myself.

Originally Posted by FangornUK

Just a suggestion on formatting, I've noticed you create BBeBs with formatting for paragraphs that follows the Web page version, i.e. with a new line between paragraphs. Most ebooks skip this and simply start on a newline, it does look better.

What I do now is add two EOL's to the file. The BBeB format does have a concept of new paragraphs and also a paragraph indent. I intend to look into how to best implement this and I suspect that eventually it will be a preference that the user can set to specify their preferred indentation style.

Thanks for the feedback!

[Latemarch]

Ok, I've tried this on a text file.
The program shows that it is making a TOC but when you make the .lrf there is no TOC on the reader.
Is there something that I'm doing wrong or is TOC just not functional yet?

[cmumford]

Originally Posted by Latemarch

Ok, I've tried this on a text file.
The program shows that it is making a TOC but when you make the .lrf there is no TOC on the reader.
Is there something that I'm doing wrong or is TOC just not functional yet?

The TOC is not yet written to the *.LRF file. I'm working on that feature right now and we hope to be doing another release fairly soon.

Thanks for giving it a spin for us.

[diabloNL]

Looks promising. Is it right that the bolded letters don't show up in the lrf? Also, what is the reason that you can set the color of the font?

Anyway, keep up the good work and I follow this thread very close.

[AndyQ]

Just to let you know that a 1.6Beta version of BBeB Binder can be found at my site (link below). It does require that the original version is installed first.

To use, backup the original BBeB Binder folder, and then overwrite the original files with the contents of the zip file.

This version is an unsupported beta version that includes a heap of changes/fixes including image support.

Feedback is much appreciated.

Cheers
Andy

Grab it from here

[diabloNL]

Originally Posted by AndyQ

Just to let you know that a 1.6Beta version of BBeB Binder can be found at my site (link below). It does require that the original version is installed first.

To use, backup the original BBeB Binder folder, and then overwrite the original files with the contents of the zip file.

This version is an unsupported beta version that includes a heap of changes/fixes including image support.

Feedback is much appreciated.

Cheers
Andy

Grab it from here

Did you see my post above you?

[FangornUK]

Thanks AndyQ and cmumford, this is coming along really nicely - been following the subversion changes closely. Let us know when you want feedback on formatting issues.

[diabloNL]

Wow! The new version is way better. I like the margins this way. But I have a question; when I open a HTM(converted from a .DOC) with BBeBinder it will show all Bolds, sizes etc. etc.,so all formatting is there. But when I save it as a .lrf all this formatting is gone. Am I doing something wrong?


Thanks for the hard work!

[cmumford]

Originally Posted by diabloNL

Wow! The new version is way better. I like the margins this way. But I have a question; when I open a HTM(converted from a .DOC) with BBeBinder it will show all Bolds, sizes etc. etc.,so all formatting is there. But when I save it as a .lrf all this formatting is gone. Am I doing something wrong?


Thanks for the hard work!

If possible can I get a copy of that document for testing? cjmumford@gmail.com

[FangornUK]

This may help with Gutenberg conversions, I used it for testing when developing gutlrf.pl

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/19130

It has centralised images, headers and text and quite a lot of different markup. Which currently BBeBinder isn't formatting.

[diabloNL]

Originally Posted by cmumford

If possible can I get a copy of that document for testing? cjmumford@gmail.com

Check your email.

[cmumford]

Originally Posted by FangornUK

This may help with Gutenberg conversions, I used it for testing when developing gutlrf.pl

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/19130

It has centralised images, headers and text and quite a lot of different markup. Which currently BBeBinder isn't formatting.

Thanks. I'll test with that document. And yes, there's still a lot of formatting that we're not converting properly. Hopefully we can start improving this shortly.

[cmumford]

Originally Posted by diabloNL

Wow! The new version is way better. I like the margins this way. But I have a question; when I open a HTM(converted from a .DOC) with BBeBinder it will show all Bolds, sizes etc. etc.,so all formatting is there. But when I save it as a .lrf all this formatting is gone. Am I doing something wrong?


Thanks for the hard work!

OK. I got the file (thanks diabloNL). Some of the formatting was converted, and some of it was not. I'm actually converting with a more recent version of BBeB Binder which is not yet released, but I don't think that it's different from what you're currently using (0.1.5) so what I'm seeing should be what you're seeing.

First off things that are italicized with <i></i>, and bolded with <b></b> should work just fine. We don't yet support CSS or spans for doing these things. So it looks like all of the italic was translated into LRF, but only some of the bolding.

For example the words "The Pulse" after chapter 1 are actually set by applying a CSS style. Unfortunately we ignore this and that is why "The Pulse" is just plain old text.

Also, in the first few chapters the words "small treasure(s)" are bold. This is converted, but only as a font weight of 150%, which is pretty subtle with the Sony Reader.

I really haven't had the time to look into CSS yet, and can't really say what our plan is for this just yet. We may get lucky and come with a good solution. (I hope).

Sorry I can't get you a better answer for now, but thanks for giving it a try and providing the input.