Where do I put the font EULA?

[Jellby]

[Note: as I'm writing this, I realized that ADE seems to ignore this, and allows hyphenation anyway, despite my saying not to in my CSS -- but it does work just fine in iBooks, at least.]

You used the CSS3 property "hyphens: none;"? ADE does not recognize that one (nor does the ePub 2.1 spec), add this: "adobe-hyphenate: none;" It works for me when I want to prevent hyphenation in titles or poetry.

(But with that selective enabling of hyphenation of certain words you are dangerously close to fixed-format, if you ask me...)

I wish I could do the exact same thing with my "olde" text, but it doesn't seem that I can! The problem, I can only assume, is that none of the longer, "problematic" words simply aren't in the built-in English dictionary (for example, "diſſapoyntmends", etc.), and the software just has no idea where/how to break the words -- and so it doesn't.

It would be more likely to work if you had use the normal "s". Still, the reader would have to have some hyphenation rules beyond the simple dictionary approach (such as it's allowed to break between t and m).

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by Jellby

You used the CSS3 property "hyphens: none;"? ADE does not recognize that one (nor does the ePub 2.1 spec), add this: "adobe-hyphenate: none;" It works for me when I want to prevent hyphenation in titles or poetry.

Oh, I'd been using this before...

-webkit-hyphens:none;
-epub-hyphens:none;
-moz-hyphens:none;
hyphens:none;

...but I'll add in that adobe one now, too. Thanks!

(But with that selective enabling of hyphenation of certain words you are dangerously close to fixed-format, if you ask me...)

How so? I can still change the font sizes, and allowed hyphenation on most of the "problematic" longer words, and tested the entire text (from beginning to end) at a whole variety of sizes, and it a reflows nicely and, indeed, works quite well -- that's for my modern text, of course.

It would be more likely to work if you had use the normal "s". Still, the reader would have to have some hyphenation rules beyond the simple dictionary approach (such as it's allowed to break between t and m).

Hmmm... when I think about it, when I was using that JSL font, even with hypenation turned completely off I didn't really see any major issues (and the issue is when, say, you're in two-page landscape mode on the iPad and the line length is short, and when a long word wraps it makes the previous line too spread out with large spaces between the words). It wasn't really a problem before because even with all my entire text set with a basefont size of 100%, that JSL font was still "smaller" in size -- which seemed to make that issue not noticeable (if not practically non-existent).

This Fell font I'm now using is "bigger", though, so maybe I'll try just shrinking it down a bit, say to 85% or 90% or something. That would probably do the trick.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Psymon

How so? I can still change the font sizes, and allowed hyphenation on most of the "problematic" longer words, and tested the entire text (from beginning to end) at a whole variety of sizes, and it a reflows nicely and, indeed, works quite well -- that's for my modern text, of course.

Only "dangerously close", not quite there

What I mean is that you want too much control on the typesetting, and that's something that the readers (both software and human) should have a say on.

With a real typesetting engine like (La)TeX, you can control on a global scale how much hyphenation you want, or how much whitespace you allow.

I dream of a day when my ebook reader will let me set up something similar and decide, given my preferred font family and size, what kind of hyphenation I find acceptable (maybe not more that two consecutive hyphenated lines, maybe not fewer than 4 characters from a word left in a line, maybe only if the word spaces are stretched to 1.5 times their natural size...). And I being an idealist after all, keep writing my ebooks so that they'll work in such a day.

It seems CSS3 at some point offered that kind of control, but not at the current stage. Prince does offer more options, if you want a PDF.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by Jellby

What I mean is that you want too much control on the typesetting, and that's something that the readers (both software and human) should have a say on.

Well, I agree 100%, but as you say the software currently doesn't allow for the user to change how much/often it hyphenates. I only did what I did with my "modern" text, because the amount of hyphenation in it was actually quite disconcerting and rather interfered with the flow of my prose. However, with that said, I was also quite reasonably liberal with my allowing hyphenation on any words that were problematic, and when doing so did not dramatically interfere with that "flow". And like I said, having tested the entire text at multiple font sizes, I do think that it actually worked out quite well.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Only "dangerously close", not quite there

What I mean is that you want too much control on the typesetting, and that's something that the readers (both software and human) should have a say on.

With a real typesetting engine like (La)TeX, you can control on a global scale how much hyphenation you want, or how much whitespace you allow.

I dream of a day when my ebook reader will let me set up something similar and decide, given my preferred font family and size, what kind of hyphenation I find acceptable (maybe not more that two consecutive hyphenated lines, maybe not fewer than 4 characters from a word left in a line, maybe only if the word spaces are stretched to 1.5 times their natural size...). And I being an idealist after all, keep writing my ebooks so that they'll work in such a day.

It seems CSS3 at some point offered that kind of control, but not at the current stage. Prince does offer more options, if you want a PDF.

Jellby:

You know I love ya, but, dude: we already have PDF. The more "geeky" reading apps are approaching this type of customization, but what you guys have to think about is, the less the reader (human) can customize the end-product to be what THEY want, the more likely they are to bitch about it.

We already hear about readers who want to be able to change absolutely everything (visit the Calibre forum on any given day for a sampling)--font, font-size, hyphenation, no-hyphenation, margins, no margins...the closer you get to "forcing" the reader to use what you want, the further away you get from younger and younger readers, all of whom want to be able to manipulate the text to their unique requirements.

Just sayin'.

Hitch

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Hitch

the closer you get to "forcing" the reader to use what you want, the further away you get from younger and younger readers, all of whom want to be able to manipulate the text to their unique requirements.

I'm very sadly aware of this, yet it would be so simple to have a default stylesheet that the user can customize (Opera, and I guess other browsers, has this), even if there is no GUI for that...

But I still have this recurring dream

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Jellby

I'm very sadly aware of this, yet it would be so simple to have a default stylesheet that the user can customize (Opera, and I guess other browsers, has this), even if there is no GUI for that...

But I still have this recurring dream

...and for that, m'boy, you do indeed have a special place in my heart. (Not to mention how much CSS I personally learned from your books!). Dreams are good. I'm just too old and jaded to still have faith in mine, as everyone here knows all too well. {sigh}.

Hitch

[mrmikel]

Right now the younger uses don't predominate as one might guess.

http://jem499.blogspot.com/2012/08/t...ographics.html

The demographics cut so many different ways I am glad I don't have to decide what to release for hardware.

The academics want to lock epubs into standard book designs while the students want to customize everything!

Seems like no matter how you try to make it useable for everyone, you are bound to leave someone out in the cold.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

Right now the younger uses don't predominate as one might guess.

http://jem499.blogspot.com/2012/08/t...ographics.html

Interesting... on the one hand, this article says "...the iPad remains the dominant tablet platform, accounting for more than two-thirds of the tablet market", and yet as has been discussed here, iBooks only has anywhere from 5% to 20% (depending on whose stats one believes) of ebook sales.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Psymon

Interesting... on the one hand, this article says "...the iPad remains the dominant tablet platform, accounting for more than two-thirds of the tablet market", and yet as has been discussed here, iBooks only has anywhere from 5% to 20% (depending on whose stats one believes) of ebook sales.

That's because people don't want to buy eBooks from Apple. They are the ones that had a major hand in bringing out higher Agency pricing. So it's only fair that Apple tanks when it comes to eBooks. 20% is wrong. It's not that high a percent. Also, on an iPhone, iBooks is garbage. They huge margins makes the reading experience lousy. That and for those of us who do strip DRM, it's easier to strip DRM from ePub (not Apple) and Kindle eBooks.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

That's because people don't want to buy eBooks from Apple. They are the ones that had a major hand in bringing out higher Agency pricing. So it's only fair that Apple tanks when it comes to eBooks. 20% is wrong. It's not that high a percent. Also, on an iPhone, iBooks is garbage. They huge margins makes the reading experience lousy. That and for those of us who do strip DRM, it's easier to strip DRM from ePub (not Apple) and Kindle eBooks.

Wolfie is right. Folks on ipads/phone seem to want to buy apps, games and videos--they are consumers of that type of content. Books? Not so much, by a huge margin. We have, as I've said before, every type of author known to man, other than hardcore porn, and the numbers we see (excepting, curiously enough, one guy with a book on self-hypnosis) are 1%, tops. The usual numbers, even for NYTimes Bestsellers are 1 book on iBooks for every 1,000 on Amazon. Maybe 1 in 100, if they're doing really well. (This tends to be YA fiction or erotica.) About 20 per hundred for B&N to Amazon, and something like 1 in a hundred for Kobo. After that, it gets ever-smaller for the other platforms.

Hitch

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Wolfie is right. Folks on ipads/phone seem to want to buy apps, games and videos--they are consumers of that type of content. Books? Not so much, by a huge margin. We have, as I've said before, every type of author known to man, other than hardcore porn, and the numbers we see (excepting, curiously enough, one guy with a book on self-hypnosis) are 1%, tops.

Thanks (to you both) for that rather enlightening perspective -- I know that this has been said (if not stressed) before, but it is starting to really sink in. I'm slow... sometimes.

Well, as I've said before, with this current project I was much more concerned with trying to get my book to look the way that I wanted it to than I was in sales, but now -- thanks to Jellby and that font set he found -- it would seem that I've come up a way to make it a little more cross-platform compatible. At least, it would seem to work reasonably okay in ADE, too, as an epub, but I haven't yet tried to convert it into MOBI format for amazon -- and it would certainly seem that amazon is the market one would want to reach out to as far as sales go.

I don't know the first thing about MOBI format -- any suggestions on where/how to proceed from here in that direction? I know there's a forum here on Calibre, and is that where I would want to start, if only by browsing the archives in there?

Pardon my utter ignorance -- I'm really so very new to all this epublishing stuff!

[JSWolf]

Mobi does not allow for font embedding. So you'll have to do your old part as plain old normal text.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Mobi does not allow for font embedding. So you'll have to do your old part as plain old normal text.

Wolfie, Wolfie, Wolfie:

Now, now, let's not be disingenuous. It's true that PRC, and K7-mobi, does not allow for font-embedding, but K8 formatting does. I know I saw you in a discussion somewhere around here as to what to call a K8-formatted book, but, Amazon calls it a "MOBI" file. There's no such thing, from the input side, as an AZW3 file; that's a Calibre output format meant strictly for reading on one's own device (as it cannot be uploaded at the KDP).

K8-formatted books can certainly contain some fonts. It can get very cranky with Type1's (just don't use 'em). Some fonts, particularly Adobe fonts, just won't work, for reasons not quite clear to me. They just don't. I mean, letters "fly" around the page, coming unhinged from whither they should be parked, like something out of a movie. (I think that there's a scene in "Young Sherlock Holmes" which is similar to this, but maybe I'm mis-remembering.) Some letters just don't display. It's a weird thing.

However, all that being said, he can always try it. The issue will be a) fallbacks for the blackletter for K7 devices, and b) whether or not the font will display correctly. Much of what was attempted in the ePUB won't work in the MOBI, like trying to force words to stay together, etc. I don't remember everything that was discussed on this book; I know something that seemed to work originally was shown to not work by simply enlarging the font...but he can always just take his ePUB and drop it on KP, and see what happens. It's only a minute or two out of his life.

BUT, again, cannot stress this strongly enough: what will you do for the millions of people who have Kindles, Kindle2's and DX'es, that can't display an embedded font?

Hitch

[Psymon]

Well, gee, I was getting so enthused here and now my bubble has been burst.

Originally Posted by Hitch

Much of what was attempted in the ePUB won't work in the MOBI, like trying to force words to stay together, etc. I don't remember everything that was discussed on this book; I know something that seemed to work originally was shown to not work by simply enlarging the font...

I think the latter issue you're referring to was when I was using that other font, in ADE the words "broke" at the end of lines wherever that font used special characters -- it wasn't when the font size changed, necessarily, but if/when one resized the window. I guess ADE doesn't recognize that "nowrap" CSS spec (nor does it seem to recognize smallcaps either).

But that font issue doesn't seem to be a problem at all with this other, new Fell font, and even though it's nice to make use of that "nowrap" thing, it doesn't totally destroy my work not to have it, and I could live without it. It does seem to be becoming clear, though, that my ebook will look the best iBooks -- at least there's that.

but he can always just take his ePUB and drop it on KP, and see what happens. It's only a minute or two out of his life.

I'm assuming that by KP you mean Kindle Previewer? Does that do an accurate job of displaying one's ebook as it really looks (and will work) in Kindle?

And I can "just take my epub and drop it" on there, it doesn't have to be converted or anything? I thought it did, that it had to be in MOBI format first.

Forgive me, I know so little and sometimes just don't know where to start. After nearly two decades in web design, though, I do understand what you've been stressing, Hitch, about backwards-compatibility and stuff, but the issues with cross-platform compatibility (let alone backwards-compatibility) seem so much more complicated than anything I experienced in web design. That latter experience of mine certainly has helped a lot, but in other respects I feel like I'm starting all over again, from scratch.

(Perfect place to insert a chinscratch)

BUT, again, cannot stress this strongly enough: what will you do for the millions of people who have Kindles, Kindle2's and DX'es, that can't display an embedded font?

Well, as I've mentioned, this first book of mine is in two parts/halves -- a modern English half and then the late-Middle English half (both of which are basically the exact same text, just in two "different" languages). For amazon I could just do that version in modern English only, I suppose -- it'd be a shame for those people to be missing out on half the "fun", of course, but I guess I could just sell it for half the price as the iBooks version.

I guess while I'm here and asking about amazon, it does seem that my current epub also works in ADE, which I understand is what other non-Kindle readers work in? Where do I go to market it for that platform? Is that, like, Barnes & Noble or something?

I'm so clueless about so much, but I don't know where to go from here -- there doesn't seem to be a forum in these forums here specifically for "Okay, now you've designed your first epub that works in iBooks, and here's what to do next, and where to go next", kinda thing. D'oh...