The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[ownedbycats]

Imagine everyone emailing publishers to use a cover on a personal copy.

[Sirtel]

Frankly, don't care. If a cover image is available, I'll use it. Just as I download a wallpaper image for personal use, or a phone ringtone, or save a TV episode for future viewing, or make backup copies of my purchased ebooks. I'm not going to ask permission for every single instance of personal use of someone's work. Things would be different if the use was public or for monetary gain, but it's not.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by John F

I assumed that also. And I assumed that the publisher paid the artist for its use. I assumed that covers are copyrighted works, and someone owns the copyright, so to use the cover you must get permission from the copyright owner.

For some books the publisher doesn't have the rights to use the paper edition cover on the ebook.

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Imagine everyone emailing publishers to use a cover on a personal copy.

Nice idea. Even better would be snail mail.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Just use sans-serif for headings.
No need to embed a body font. Time New Roman is terrible for this.
For handwritten notes, just use italics.
For text printed or displayed on a screen, use monospace.

That way you don't need any embedded font that don't work and don't look good and for eInk will be terrible.

I do use a San Serif typeface for the headings. I just prefer Calibre over some of the others that are available to me (such as Arial and Franklin Gothic).

What's wrong with Times New Roman as a body typeface? It's legible at a moderate size (13pt or 14pt), and it is commonly available. About the only negative is that it might be considered a bit boring since it is so often used. I have considered Thorndale as an alternative. I also considered Georgia but dislike the way it renders numbers.

The reason I use Comic Sans is that I wanted a typeface that looks like handwriting without being too fancy, like many of the script-like typefaces that are so fancy that they are difficult to read.

For printed text or screen display I do use a monospace typeface. I chose Courier New because, like with Times New Roman, it is commonly available, legible at a moderate size, and it's appearance clearly indicates something printed.

I do use italics when showing thoughts. What I do is surround the thoughts with square parenthesis (using them just like I use quotation marks when rendering speech) and render the thoughts in italics.

When I make an ebook for my own use, I make it a PDF so everything needed to render the ebook is part of the file itself. I don't have to worry about which typefaces I have on my computer and/or e-reader, and it will appear on my e-reader exactly as intended.

[Quoth]

Times New Roman was designed for 72 to 96 dpi CRTs! Yes, you can use it, but there are better serif fonts for 200 to 300 dpi such as eink. Some of the nice body fonts for paper still don't work well enough on eink (Laser printers are now 600 dpi to 1200 dpi, and photo-lithographic offset can be better or worse).

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

I do use a San Serif typeface for the headings. I just prefer Calibre over some of the others that are available to me (such as Arial and Franklin Gothic).

You don't need to use an embedded font for the chapter headers. Let the user choose with his/her choice of font.

What's wrong with Times New Roman as a body typeface? It's legible at a moderate size (13pt or 14pt), and it is commonly available. About the only negative is that it might be considered a bit boring since it is so often used. I have considered Thorndale as an alternative. I also considered Georgia but dislike the way it renders numbers.

Times New Roman is not a good font to use as the body font. It don't work well on an eInk screen. Besides, a lot of people have their own preference of main font.

The reason I use Comic Sans is that I wanted a typeface that looks like handwriting without being too fancy, like many of the script-like typefaces that are so fancy that they are difficult to read.

There are lots of handwriting fonts that are not Comic Sans. Have a look here. There are many handwriting fonts. You'll be able to find something good. https://www.1001fonts.com/handwritten-fonts.html?page=1

For printed text or screen display I do use a monospace typeface. I chose Courier New because, like with Times New Roman, it is commonly available, legible at a moderate size, and it's appearance clearly indicates something printed.

By using your choice of Courier New, if could be too light for eInk. It would not be an issue if you fond a version of Courier that's dark enough.

I do use italics when showing thoughts. What I do is surround the thoughts with square parenthesis (using them just like I use quotation marks when rendering speech) and render the thoughts in italics.

When I see [some text], I expect that to be a link to an endnote/footnote. The text should make it obvious it's a thought and not the use of brackets.

When I make an ebook for my own use, I make it a PDF so everything needed to render the ebook is part of the file itself. I don't have to worry about which typefaces I have on my computer and/or e-reader, and it will appear on my e-reader exactly as intended.

Do you make the PDF for the screen size of your Reader? IMHO, you should make the eBook in a reflowable format. The reason being is that it won't matter the screen size. Also if you want to change the text size you can.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Times New Roman was designed for 72 to 96 dpi CRTs! Yes, you can use it, but there are better serif fonts for 200 to 300 dpi such as eink. Some of the nice body fonts for paper still don't work well enough on eink (Laser printers are now 600 dpi to 1200 dpi, and photo-lithographic offset can be better or worse).

Adobe Garamond is an awful font to use on eInk (IMHO) but it's used a lot.

[Solitaire1]

JSWolf wrote the following as part of a post:

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Do you make the PDF for the screen size of your Reader? IMHO, you should make the eBook in a reflowable format. The reason being is that it won't matter the screen size. Also if you want to change the text size you can.

The ebooks I make are just for myself and my ereader. Due to this I haven't worried about reflowing, I just make sure it looks good on my e-reader.

I use LibreOffice to make my PDFs and I set the page size so it is the same as screen of my e-reader (3.5 inches by 4.75 inches with 0.1 inch margins). That way when I set it to page view I can see exactly what it will look like on my e-reader. Plus, it doesn't have the page numbering issue that EPUB has where a "page" might be three or four screens on my e-reader.

I use PDF because it's easy to generate an ebook in the format. I just create an OpenDocument Text Document, format it, and then click on Export Directly as PDF. Although it does require me to reformat my ebooks, it isn't too much of a pain.

I've tried using Calibre to convert an ebook to EPUB but I wasn't pleased with the results. However, I'm going to check to see what formats work best with Calibre as a source file that will be converted into an EPUB. It could be that I've chosen a format that Calibre has trouble converting properly into an EPUB. I wouldn't mind if something as basic as an RTF file would make a good source for an EPUB as long as it converts properly.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

JSWolf wrote the following as part of a post:



The ebooks I make are just for myself and my ereader. Due to this I haven't worried about reflowing, I just make sure it looks good on my e-reader.

I use LibreOffice to make my PDFs and I set the page size so it is the same as screen of my e-reader (3.5 inches by 4.75 inches with 0.1 inch margins). That way when I set it to page view I can see exactly what it will look like on my e-reader. Plus, it doesn't have the page numbering issue that EPUB has where a "page" might be three or four screens on my e-reader.

I use PDF because it's easy to generate an ebook in the format. I just create an OpenDocument Text Document, format it, and then click on Export Directly as PDF. Although it does require me to reformat my ebooks, it isn't too much of a pain.

I've tried using Calibre to convert an ebook to EPUB but I wasn't pleased with the results. However, I'm going to check to see what formats work best with Calibre as a source file that will be converted into an EPUB. It could be that I've chosen a format that Calibre has trouble converting properly into an EPUB. I wouldn't mind if something as basic as an RTF file would make a good source for an EPUB as long as it converts properly.

DocX makes a good source as long as you've used styles. Without styles, you can end up with a mess.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

JSWolf wrote the following as part of a post:
I wouldn't mind if something as basic as an RTF file would make a good source for an EPUB as long as it converts properly.

The docx is best. I've tried all the possibilities. It's nearly perfect if the docx is properly created (even if it's a converted LibreOffice ODT). Only Save As a docx for Calibre and only edit odt on LO Writer as it otherwise converts on every import.
You might have to use the Edit Tool bag (Spans & Divs) to change <p to <h for headings if the style name was not Heading1, Heading2 etc, but as the class name will be unique to headings that's a simple change.
The CSS of Images width & height will need edited in Calibre too unless they are small ones

The default units must be pt in LO or MS Word, not cm or inches as that only works for paper / pdfs.
You might need to change margin-top to padding-top for any heading at the start of a new page.

Only have one page style, no registration, headers, footers. All that is for POD / PDF / Paper.

Don't use lists, simulate with regular paragraph styles and manually enter the list prefix because lists using HTML are poorly supported on ereaders.

No columns or logical frames and tables are tricky. You can have enclosing line styles on a paragraph style for visual frames (any or all of the 4 sides), but no curve on corners.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

DocX makes a good source as long as you've used styles. Without styles, you can end up with a mess.

It's totally a mess without properly done styles. No direct formatting!

[ownedbycats]

Having to scroll past 50 lines of awards and quotations. Just tell me what the book is about.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Quoth

The docx is best. I've tried all the possibilities. It's nearly perfect if the docx is properly created (even if it's a converted LibreOffice ODT). Only Save As a docx for Calibre and only edit odt on LO Writer as it otherwise converts on every import.
You might have to use the Edit Tool bag (Spans & Divs) to change <p to <h for headings if the style name was not Heading1, Heading2 etc, but as the class name will be unique to headings that's a simple change.
The CSS of Images width & height will need edited in Calibre too unless they are small ones

The default units must be pt in LO or MS Word, not cm or inches as that only works for paper / pdfs.
You might need to change margin-top to padding-top for any heading at the start of a new page.

Only have one page style, no registration, headers, footers. All that is for POD / PDF / Paper.

Don't use lists, simulate with regular paragraph styles and manually enter the list prefix because lists using HTML are poorly supported on ereaders.

No columns or logical frames and tables are tricky. You can have enclosing line styles on a paragraph style for visual frames (any or all of the 4 sides), but no curve on corners.

I will give DOCX a try and see it works better than RTF. I like the RTF format because it is just text with tagging and it is readable by just about word processor, and is somewhat easy to understand if you view it through a text editor. This is different from the DOC format, which I avoid whenever possible.

Since RTF is one of Calibre's conversion supported formats, I took a ODT file (a story I wrote myself), saved it as an RTF, imported the RTF file into Calibre, and then used Calibre to convert it into an EPUB. The results weren't very good, with the following issues:

• Everything was rendered in a single typeface at the same size
• No page breaks at the beginning of chapters
• Page breaks where they shouldn't be (each line in my title page had a page break before it)
• Widow and orphan issues
• Centering missing where formatted by styles
• Nothing listed in the e-readers Table of Contents except for "Start" while with the PDF version the contents are listed (chapters and scene breaks)

About the only things that made it through correctly was:

• The text I marked as thoughts (which I directly formatted in italics)
• The text intended to be bold was bold in the EPUB

At least it appears that the text does reflow correctly.

Although it is possible that the issues occurred in LibreOffice's conversion to RTF, I'm going to check Calibre's conversion settings to see if I need to make some changes to fix these issues.

[Renate]

I think the Calibre conversion is try to be too smart and inferring things like page breaks from empty lines. EPUB (2) is of course just HTML. It should be easy to see where the wrong assumptions are being made.

[pdurrant]

Would people PLEASE keep general discussions of typography OUT of the VENT AND RANT thread!