valid code but too complicated for e-reader

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by cybmole

thanks - I finally get the difference between <small> and small-caps. If I were a developer I'd want to test which of the current crop of e-readers & tablets can handle small-caps, within the readers' own "original" font - if that's already been done & anyone has a link.please post it...

Kindles (KF8) handle font-variant: smallcaps, and some of the Android/iOS reading programs handle it as well (I know for sure that Mantano and Bluefire support it, I assume iBooks + Marvin support it as well).

Not too sure on the situation of most ereaders, but ADE itself does not support smallcaps.... and many of these readers are ADE based.

[DiapDealer]

Mantano's built on Adobe's RMSDK, as well. I've never tested it, but would expect it to ignore font-variant just like ADE does.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Mantano's built on Adobe's RMSDK, as well. I've never tested it, but would expect it to ignore font-variant just like ADE does.

I just tested on Bluefire and Mantano on my phone and both didn't show font-variant: smallcaps... I could have sworn it did the last time I tested it (many many moons ago)!

Maybe I am just going crazy... or maybe it was a feature built into the Premium versions?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Maybe I am just going crazy... or maybe it was a feature built into the Premium versions?

Well, not the Mantano Premium version, anyway. That's what I use.

[cybmole]

different book - same topic

each chapter of this book opens with a small-caps phrase which appears in all capitals in sigil book view, but appears as lower case on the sony reader. e.g.

<p class="calibre5"><span class="calibre9">the cage opens at the front, a double loop</span> of chain hingeing its door at the bottom. At the top, a thicker chain and a fist-sized padlock keep the cage safely shut.</p>

.calibre9 { font-variant: small-caps }

so is there any way, short of retyping the start of every chapter , to add some CSS that ADE/sony does understand which will make that opening phrase display in caps ?

update - well google is telling me there is no CSS workaround, but could sigil's own regex engine fix this easily.

I need a regex that will transform all letters within a class ="calibre9" span to uppercase

[theducks]

Originally Posted by cybmole

different book - same topic

each chapter of this book opens with a small-caps phrase which appears in all capitals in sigil book view, but appears as lower case on the sony reader. e.g.

<p class="calibre5"><span class="calibre9">the cage opens at the front, a double loop</span> of chain hingeing its door at the bottom. At the top, a thicker chain and a fist-sized padlock keep the cage safely shut.</p>

.calibre9 { font-variant: small-caps }

so is there any way, short of retyping the start of every chapter , to add some CSS that ADE/sony does understand which will make that opening phrase display in caps ?

update - well google is telling me there is no CSS workaround, but could sigil's own regex engine fix this easily.

I need a regex that will transform all letters within a class ="calibre9" span to uppercase

Absolutly

I cut this from my saved searches, so it has MY line numbers

104\Name=Cleanup/Upper the case
104\Find="<span class=\"calibre9\">(.+?)</span>"
104\Replace="<span class=\"calibre9\">\\U\\1</span>"

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by cybmole

I need a regex that will transform all letters within a class ="calibre9" span to uppercase

That's fairly easy to accomplish:

Find:<span class="calibre9">(.*?)</span>
Replace:<span class="calibre9">\U\1\E</span>

For more information on converting to and from upper case characters see this older post of mine.

However, if you start out with upper case text, you'll probably also need to convert the text to lower case. Otherwise you'll get all caps text.

.calibre9 { text-transform: lowercase; font-variant: small-caps; }

@theducks: You'll need to add \E at the end; otherwise the final </span> will also be capitalized.

[cybmole]

thanks - I had experimented & used 2 passes because I did not know about the \E,

so I did a 2nd pass to change /SPAN to /span

seems to have done the trick

interestingly, there's a sequel to this book which has similar formatting, except that in the sequel, they put the opening phrases into caps. thus it looked ok even when small-caps failed to kick in.
publishers learning from their mistakes - whatever next

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

That's fairly easy to accomplish:

Find:<span class="calibre9">(.*?)</span>
Replace:<span class="calibre9">\U\1\E</span>

For more information on converting to and from upper case characters see this older post of mine.

However, if you start out with upper case text, you'll probably also need to convert the text to lower case. Otherwise you'll get all caps text.

.calibre9 { text-transform: lowercase; font-variant: small-caps; }

@theducks: You'll need to add \E at the end; otherwise the final </span> will also be capitalized.

Thanks. Fixing my saved search NOW

[GrannyGrump]

Very nice regex info in this thread, thanks guys.

I guess those of us who use embedded small-caps fonts instead of gambling on support for "transform" and "font-variant" are going to have to mend our ways.

Edit to add: For the lead-in on a new chapter, I usually use all-caps styled for .7em bold, following a large drop-cap or large initial cap. I use the small-caps font for stuff inline in other text, such as "signatures" or signs, etc.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by GrannyGrump

Very nice regex info in this thread, thanks guys.

I guess those of us who use embedded small-caps fonts instead of gambling on support for "transform" and "font-variant" are going to have to mend our ways.

Edit to add: For the lead-in on a new chapter, I usually use all-caps styled for .7em bold, following a large drop-cap or large initial cap. I use the small-caps font for stuff inline in other text, such as "signatures" or signs, etc.

I wish I'd seen this thread when it started. We had a series of go-rounds with a publisher about this nearly...two years ago? Who also wanted what they first called a 'drop cap' and ended up being ye olden Raised Initial, which would have been all well and good, but it was a RI with a set of smallcaps, (as in the original part of the discussion) and after MUCH going-round, the long and short of it is, in ADE, that simply does not work, and it's a bastard on Nooks. You either get the world's hinkiest broken lines/words (it hyphenates in the most bizarre places), or, if you set hyphenation: off, you end up with something looking a bit like this:

B
i
l
f
o
r
d

C
h
u
r
c
h

(Assume all the non-bolded letters are smallcaps). OR, the first word is aligned horizontally, but the next one is as you see the example. We tried everything, and even consulted with both Josh and Liz about it. Something in ADE's software just...don't like it, nohow, noway. Whatever the issue is, it's a dog to make work, no matter what you do with those smallcaps/smallcap variants, faux smallcaps, etc. Now, I haven't tried it since 2.0, I don't think...but man, it was the pits back then. I don't think I've given it a whirl since, as it was a lot of fuss for something fairly minor.

FWIW.
Hitch

[cybmole]

a final? (maybe) word on all this small caps stuff.

In all the books I've seen it used, in whatever variant, I have yet to see it used intelligently - ever. By which I mean ending it with attention to context, at the end of a sentence, or phrase.

It seems that publishers decide to always small cap the first N words, or the first N centimetres.

So you get small caps intro chunks that consist of sentence + one word, or all-but-one word of a phrase, or even ones bug out half way through someone's name, at the FN/LN boundary.

Maybe it's all down to machine typesetting, surely in ye golden olden days of human typesetting ther'd be a little more sense applied ?

& its not impossible to write regex that ends the small caps if a full stop or comma is detected.

[GrannyGrump]

Hitch said

in ADE, that simply does not work, and it's a bastard on Nooks.

Well, that is mightily depressing. Faux small caps don't work? But it is just a simple span, how could they mess up something that basic? Must I give up my drop cap with faux small caps?

@cybmole, I agree. I personally like to use a logical phrase or sentence fragment, not necessarily the same number of words for each chapter. I really don't like the "single word" set off this way -- a short word like "the" or "but" looks like an orphan child sitting there in its solitary all-caps splendor. Even if traditional publishers have been using that for several centuries now (at least since the mid-1800's).

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by cybmole

It seems that publishers decide to always small cap the first N words, or the first N centimetres.

It is such a shame that font-variants are not supported or pseudo elements. Then :first-line could be used to create small caps of the first line, regardless of the fontsize.

You would think that this made a lot of sense to include on an e-reader...

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by cybmole

It seems that publishers decide to always small cap the first N words, or the first N centimetres.

It's probably the first line, in the printed book, and then it gets blindly converted to ebook.

I sometimes try to include the first few words that make some sense, as in "When Peter Jones asked...", "The old manor house was...", "During the following years they met...", etc.

Originally Posted by Toxaris

It is such a shame that font-variants are not supported or pseudo elements. Then :first-line could be used to create small caps of the first line, regardless of the fontsize.

Exactly, and font-variant and pseudo-elements are required in the ePub 2.0.1 spec, so the problem is we do not have ePub-compliant readers (and book creators try to work around that).

Use font-variant and :first-line, and nothing will actually be lost (you will not see the small-caps in most readers, but is it so important?)