BookDesigner vs Crocodile Wrestling

[=X=]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

=X=, can you give us examples of what you want to do that you cannot do?

Most novels (that I know of) would be perfectly OK in Book Designer and then output as LRF.

Sure,
I've showed two pictures.
One is for Rule #1 and the other is the Richest Man In Babyolon.

For Rule #1 I completely abandoned any tools BD and Calibre. I had to user OpenOffice and extract it to PDF. Ironically shortly after I finished reading the book Kovid fixed the formating issues with Rule#1 and it looks great.
Snip#1 used different font settings and paragraph styles. BD only allows paragraphs to be justified, or margin


For the Richest Man in Babylon. I was able to get 70% done us BD but had to again jump to OO and Calibre to finish the product. I could not get the paragraphes to aling. Also I only wanted to indent a specific paragraph. With BD it's all or nothing.

=X=

[vivaldirules]

I'm having a new frustration with BD today with diacritical marks. I took a text file that didn't use diacritical marks, opened it with BD, fixed it up with added images and such and also the correct diacritic marks (well, I think they're correct) like: ō, ū, ā, which I copied individually from Wikipedia into BD. When I create an LRF ebook, I get:

& # 3 3 3 ; (I've put spaces between the actual characters so they don't get interpreted by the forum software)

instead of ō, etc. So I diddled with the language setting and have tried all of them to no avail. I did this by saving the file, changing the language setting in BD, exiting, and then reopening the file with BD. No change. So I saved an HTML file and then opened it with Internet Explorer. No problem - the characters are correctly displayed. So I opened that HTML with BD and now the problem characters are totally missing. I'm at a loss at how to get these characters inserted into BD so that I can create ebooks with it. Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?

[Strether]

My own experience is never give BD anything in text and expect good results.

Pending instructions from experts, I'd take a couple of pages of the text, run Stingo's macro on it, make the diacritical changes you want, save it as RTF, and then try it in BD.

Jim

[JSWolf]

[QUOTE==X=;213214]Sure,
I've showed two pictures.
One is for Rule #1 and the other is the Richest Man In Babyolon.

For Rule #1 I completely abandoned any tools BD and Calibre. I had to user OpenOffice and extract it to PDF. Ironically shortly after I finished reading the book Kovid fixed the formating issues with Rule#1 and it looks great.
Snip#1 used different font settings and paragraph styles. BD only allows paragraphs to be justified, or margin [quote]

Actually, this is very easy to do. What you do is pick a style to use for the paragraphs with no indent such as verse. Then in styles of the Make Sony Reader file, you select the font, the size, the indent which in this case would be 0 and the align as justify style as normal, shit % as 0 and width % as 100. Then you'll get paragraphs that have no indent on output when you use Verse as the style.

For the Richest Man in Babylon. I was able to get 70% done us BD but had to again jump to OO and Calibre to finish the product. I could not get the paragraphes to aling. Also I only wanted to indent a specific paragraph. With BD it's all or nothing.

Again use a specific style such as epigraph to sort out how the paragraph comes out.

It's not all or nothing if you use the different styles.

[=X=]

@Jon Thanks for the tip. I'll try them on my next eBook. Here is a quick question. I've noticed that using the menu <Configuration| Fonts...> I can change the font size of any given text. However when I create the eBook this setting is disregarded. Is there any way to change a font size without having to use a style (given that there is a limited # for them)


@ vivaldirules, I don't know if this will help. But I've had the same thing happen to me. The way I worked around this was by changing the book encoding "File | Book encoding" to from the default "Cyrillic" to "Western Europian (ISO)" then re-loading the html file.

=X=

[vivaldirules]

[QUOTE==X=;213688@ vivaldirules, I don't know if this will help. But I've had the same thing happen to me. The way I worked around this was by changing the book encoding "File | Book encoding" to from the default "Cyrillic" to "Western Europian (ISO)" then re-loading the html file.

=X=[/QUOTE]

Well, thanks for trying but that doesn't seem to work either. This is very strange. I'd be happy to simply type in the needed characters directly into BD since there are only a few of them. But I can't even figure out how to do that properly.

[vivaldirules]

I should add that from the current book I have in BD, the diacritical marks are correctly displayed and I can make a PRC that Mobipocket displays correctly. But the IMP file that I create displays a ? for each of these characters and the LRF file I create displays
& # 3 3 3 ; (I've put spaces between the actual characters so they don't get interpreted by the forum software). So is the issue with a lack of imbedded fonts (he asks ignorantly not knowing what that really means nor how to figure that out, find the appropriate fonts, nor imbed them)?

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

I should add that from the current book I have in BD, the diacritical marks are correctly displayed and I can make a PRC that Mobipocket displays correctly. But the IMP file that I create displays a ? for each of these characters and the LRF file I create displays
& # 3 3 3 ; (I've put spaces between the actual characters so they don't get interpreted by the forum software). So is the issue with a lack of imbedded fonts (he asks ignorantly not knowing what that really means nor how to figure that out, find the appropriate fonts, nor imbed them)?

imp files are notoriously incapable of displaying many many special characters, alas. i ran into this problem with greek characters and accented characters used in transcribing phonetics recently, and it turns out to be a shortcoming in the embedded font, which is incomplete, and cannot be supplemented / replaced (so far, that i know of). maybe i should get nick to try and tackle that, for his next project...

so if it's only in the imp file you're having problems, there's probably nothing you can do about it, sadly.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

... maybe i should get nick to try and tackle that, for his next project...

Sure go ahead, imp me out to whoever has that need....

The '?' in the .imp can result from two situations:

1) Html code that is known and recognized, but the EBW 1150 embedded font doesn't support, i.e. "& frac12;" or "& #189;" which should display "½" (remove the space after & to get the true Html code!). Many Greek letters fall into this category. You can't do much here except find some work-around like using "1/2" instead of "½".

2) Actual ASCII character (i.e. "©") used instead of the known and displayable Html code (i.e. "& copy;" or "& #169;"). Usually can be fixed by running your .html through Tidy.exe or TidyGUI.exe. However, this may sometimes introduce "other" problems so do this on a backup copy first. If you notice which ASCII characters get converted, you can then do a simple search & replace on your original file if you don't want to use the "tidy'ed" file.

These '?' are inherent problems when converting to .imp, but can usually be overcome by using Html codes instead of literal ASCII character representations. See our wiki pages on Character Sets, in particular ISO-8859-1 and Special characters.

My 2 cents worth... (Ya, you got a discounted rate, since the going rate for imp services are way more! )

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by nrapallo

Sure go ahead, imp me out to whoever has that need....

:extra strength groaning smiley:

The '?' in the .imp can result from two situations:
1) Html code that is known and recognized, but the EBW 1150 embedded font doesn't support, i.e. "& frac12;" or "& #189;" which should display "½" (remove the space after & to get the true Html code!). Many Greek letters fall into this category. You can't do much here except find some work-around like using "1/2" instead of "½".

for your next project (since i'm sure you have nothing else to do, right ? ), could you try to find a way to put in a custom font ? one that actually has a few special characters ? or is that completely impossible ?

2) Actual ASCII character (i.e. "©") used instead of the known and displayable Html code (i.e. "& copy;" or "& #169;"). Usually can be fixed by running your .html through Tidy.exe or TidyGUI.exe. However, this may sometimes introduce "other" problems so do this on a backup copy first. If you notice which ASCII characters get converted, you can then do a simple search & replace on your original file if you don't want to use the "tidy'ed" file.

These '?' are inherent problems when converting to .imp, but can usually be overcome by using Html codes instead of literal ASCII character representations. See our wiki pages on Character Sets, in particular ISO-8859-1 and Special characters.

sadly, i suspect in this case the problem is that the special characters are not supported by the imp font. this is a big problem.

My 2 cents worth... (Ya, you got a discounted rate, since the going rate for imp services are way more! )

that's nice of you to give a special deal to your friends. we appreciate it.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

:extra strength groaning smiley:

for your next project (since i'm sure you have nothing else to do, right ? ), could you try to find a way to put in a custom font ? one that actually has a few special characters ? or is that completely impossible ?

From me, yes, that would be near impossible. While I might tinker here and there; encrypted ROM hacking of this nature is beyond me...

sadly, i suspect in this case the problem is that the special characters are not supported by the imp font. this is a big problem.


that's nice of you to give a special deal to your friends. we appreciate it.

Happy to contribute!

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by nrapallo

From me, yes, that would be near impossible. While I might tinker here and there; encrypted ROM hacking of this nature is beyond me...

well, i rather thought that would be the case. oh well. just have to hope my good friend Garth Conboy will save the day.

someday.

[Patricia]

BD just won't do diacritical marks, such as the macrons you mention, VR. It will do circumflexes [ô, â] which are sometimes an adequate substitute.

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

I'm having a new frustration with BD today with diacritical marks. I took a text file that didn't use diacritical marks, opened it with BD, fixed it up with added images and such and also the correct diacritic marks (well, I think they're correct) like: ō, ū, ā, which I copied individually from Wikipedia into BD. When I create an LRF ebook, I get:

& # 3 3 3 ; (I've put spaces between the actual characters so they don't get interpreted by the forum software)

instead of ō, etc. So I diddled with the language setting and have tried all of them to no avail. I did this by saving the file, changing the language setting in BD, exiting, and then reopening the file with BD. No change. So I saved an HTML file and then opened it with Internet Explorer. No problem - the characters are correctly displayed. So I opened that HTML with BD and now the problem characters are totally missing. I'm at a loss at how to get these characters inserted into BD so that I can create ebooks with it. Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?