1001 Nights preview

[Jellby]

As I announced elsewhere, I'm working in "The Book of the Thousand Nights and [One|A] Night". I've more or less finished formatting the first volume of Payne's translation Burton's will take a bit longer because it has more and longer footnotes, and the PG text is worse.

Here is a preview of what the book will look like, still missing cover and some information, but I want to show the preview because it's a bit fancy, and I hope to get some feedback (whether it works and whether you like it).

Some decisions: Payne's translation does not divide the text in nights, it simply adds the night numbers as sidenotes. I've decided to add the night headlines to keep some of the "feeling" of the wrapping story (Shehrzad/Scheherazade interrupting the story every day and continuing the next night). For the same reason, in Payne's and Burton's translation I've set the nights as "chapters", besides, having the stories as "chapters" would be a daunting task, given the complex nesting, especially in this first volume. Nights are a bit more uniform in size, and pagebreaks there are more appropriate.

Neither translation has any explicit formatting for when a story ends or is interrupted, I've added some dingbats: a large closing quote when it ends, a flower when it is interrupted or resumed (see pages 27, 28, 41, 52 in the pdf). I've also added a large asterisks in the caesura of verses (Burton does it, Payne only uses the capital letter) to ease the long lines. Finally, I've added some stars to the right of the story titles, marking the "level" of the story to help keep track (the more stars, the deeper the story is). All these marks are added with generated content, so they will probably not appear in most epub readers, but there will be at least linebreaks, I hope; I might add the marks explicitly in the final version. (Actually the marks are added in an alternate stylesheet, so ideally it should be possible to enable/disable them on the fly; this is the case if you open the xhtml files in a browser and use, for instance the context style switcher firefox plugin.)

There are two tocs. One for nights, indicating when stories start or end (but not which story), and another for stories, indicating which nights start during each story (not including sub-stories).

I'm attaching the epub and a pdf to serve as a kind of reference rendering.

I await your feedback

[Doitsu]

I really like your book design. One can clearly see that you put a great deal of thought into it. For example, indicating the narrative structure with dingbats in the stories TOC is a neat touch that none of the other 1001 Nights editions has.
The only thing I don't like is the decorative font that you've chosen for footnote numbers because they're not very readable. For example, the 7 looks like an upside down 2.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a reader that will faithfully render all fonts and styles that you've used. I've tested the original ePub2 file and a Sigil-converted ePub3 file with ADE4, Readium and a Kindle PW2 (which uses a Webkit rendering engine), and only Readium displayed (almost) everything correctly.

Does your Kobo Aura display everything as designed?

[RbnJrg]

EpubReader (for Firefox) also displayed everything correctly (if you set all parameters as defined by the book). Just margins between paragraphs seems to be a bit tiny.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

The only thing I don't like is the decorative font that you've chosen for footnote numbers because they're not very readable. For example, the 7 looks like an upside down 2.

I noticed that, but I thought that there should be no need to read the footnote numbers anyway. I mean, one would follow the link rather than search for the number. I wanted to use a font that's different enough from the text, hoping that it would help ignoring them (after some practice) when reading the text.

Does your Kobo Aura display everything as designed?

I haven't tried yet, but I don't think it displays any of the :after pseudo-elements. Hopefully, most of the problems will be solved if I include the dingbats explicitly rather than through CSS.

Originally Posted by RbnJrg

Just margins between paragraphs seems to be a bit tiny.

I guess "0" is tiny enough I set all my books with "p { margin: 0 }" (and some indent), as I believe there should be no margins between paragraphs by default, as in paper books.

[RbnJrg]

Originally Posted by Jellby

I guess "0" is tiny enough I set all my books with "p { margin: 0 }" (and some indent), as I believe there should be no margins between paragraphs by default, as in paper books.

Yes, that's tiny enough What I wanted to say is that margins before and after a dingbat are tiny; look at this screenshot:



Of course, it can perfectly be your election, but it seemed to me that a bit more of space could be nice. Anyway, great work yours; congratulations.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by RbnJrg

What I wanted to say is that margins before and after a dingbat are tiny

Ah, yes, that's kind of intentional. Although I didn't put much thought on it, I didn't want to add much vertical space in the middle of sentences, the dingbats are a little too obtrusive already. I'll do some experiments.

Anyway, great work yours; congratulations.

Thank you, I'll try not to get mental before finishing the project

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Does your Kobo Aura display everything as designed?

I tried now, generated content is absent as expected, but that's acceptable. The font for the titles does not show, as in your ADE4-EPUB2 screenshot, there may be some issue with the font, I'll try fixing it or finding another one. I'm a bit worried by your EPUB3 samples, they seem to be ignoring the formatting to break the poetry lines, could it be a problem with the Sigil conversion?

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Jellby

I'm a bit worried by your EPUB3 samples, they seem to be ignoring the formatting to break the poetry lines, could it be a problem with the Sigil conversion?

AFAIK, KevinH's ePub3 converter doesn't touch styles or individual HTML tags, except for the DOCTYPE and meta tags and some other non-HTML tags. For a summary of the changes, see his release notes.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Jellby

The font for the titles does not show, as in your ADE4-EPUB2 screenshot, there may be some issue with the font, I'll try fixing it or finding another one.

It was just a problem of the @font-face rule, I specified that the font is italic, but the titles are set in non-italic, so some readers do not use the font.

[RobertDDL]

As it happens, I've been working on Burton's "1001 Nights" since 2009, and so far have completed volumes 1 to 11. I suppose neither of us has been aware of the other's work, but fortunately they seem to complement each other perfectly well. I'm not doing ePub, only plain text and PDF, with my PDFs being formatted quite differently from yours; another difference is that I greatly reduce the extent of Burton's footnotes. So, I think that neither of our efforts have been wasted, and the readers have a nice choice between our different versions -- good luck with your work!

[Jellby]

Are you proofreading the text in any way? If you are, I'd like to have whatever corrections you apply.

As for not being aware of each other's work, I started only a couple of months ago, so I'm not surprised you didn't know in 2009

[RobertDDL]

Yes, I'm proofreading quite thoroughly (at least, to me it seems so). I'm not sure, though, if my version will be of great use to you, because I delete the majority of Burton's footnotes, and abridge many of those that I keep. Also, I sometimes edit punctuation (particularly quotation marks), unfortunately having slightly changed my own rules after Volume 1 (I'll probably revise that one when I'm done with #16), and I separate the text into paragraphs according to my own notions. I think it would be a good idea if you stayed closer to the original version and kept all of Burton's footnotes, so that interested readers have a true choice according to their preferences (someone with a scientific interest, for instance, would then prefer yours).

Anyway, you can freely download my plain text files, currently volumes 1 to 11 (it will probably take me until 2017 to reach #16) -- you find them here:

http://www.dunyazad-library.net/auth...cis-burton.htm

I hope we'll stay in contact!

[Jellby]

Thanks. I hope I'll be able to compare your text with mine and typos, ignoring formatting differences. I've already done that with PG texts and other sources. Actually, for later volumes I should probably use your text as source and add the full footnotes and my formatting.

[Jellby]

And here is preview of the full Payne translation. Same formatting as two years ago, I haven't hard-coded the dingbats yet. I'm not sure what to do with the "variant" story that appears currently after night 845 (dcccxlv).

[RobertDDL]

Great! When you've completed your work, I'd like to put a link to it on my Burton 1001 Nights page. (All 16 volumes done by now, BTW.)