Leinster, Murray: The Wailing Asteroid

[DMcCunney]

William F. Jenkins, writing as "Murray Leinster", began his career writing for the pulp magazines, publishing his first story in H. L. Menken's "The Smart Set" in 1916, just short of his 20th birthday. He wrote in a variety of genres, including detective stories, westerns, horror, and romance as well as SF. He's credited with being the first to use the concept of "Alternate History", which has blossomed into a genre of its own. He continued publishing into the 1960's, and wrote movie and TV scripts as well as stories and novels.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Leinster

"The Wailing Asteroid" dates from 1960. Strange signals are being received from far off in space. The source is a remote asteroid. The sounds carried by the signals aren't new to inventor Joe Burke. He's been hearing them in his dreams since he was a small child. The dreams are apparently provoked by a fragment of crystalline material brought back from a cave in Europe that Joe has kept beneath his pillow.

Using technology learned from his dreams, Joe builds a ship in his backyard to go and investigate, taking along his assistant and their girlfriends. The asteroid is a fortress, built to guard against a great menace, and abandoned millenia ago by its garrison. The signals are warnings, and a call to the vanished garrison to resume their stations. The menace the fortress was built to defend against has been detected and is coming our way.

The book got a 1967 British film adaptation as "The Terrornauts", scripted by SF writer John Brunner.

This is a MobiPocket book, with cover, author photo, proper table of contents and an attempt at proper formatting (IE, no forced justification), with Standard Compression. It's also an excuse to learn something about Book Designer and MobiPocket Creator. Comments welcomed.
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Dennis

[cmbs]

Dennis, I'm only saying this because you seem to believe you've got the book formatted in a way that you really don't.

Your table of contents is not linked to the software's table of contents button. That means a person has to go hunting for it, which takes a long time. Navigation is greatly improved when it's linked. You can link it by using the Guide in Mobipocket Creator.

Also, your justification IS set for full and it CANNOT be changed. You should totally remove any reference to justification in your page code in order to allow the reader to set it the way he or she wants it.

Your cover image works fine. Good job on that.

Do you have the desktop reader? It's free and will allow you to test the files you create.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by cmbs

Dennis, I'm only saying this because you seem to believe you've got the book formatted in a way that you really don't.

Your table of contents is not linked to the software's table of contents button. That means a person has to go hunting for it, which takes a long time. Navigation is greatly improved when it's linked. You can link it by using the Guide in Mobipocket Creator.

Also, your justification IS set for full and it CANNOT be changed. You should totally remove any reference to justification in your page code in order to allow the reader to set it the way he or she wants it.

I thought I'd neutered that. I use Book Designer to massage the HTML, and import the result to Mobi Creator. The forced justification is a BD annoyance: it insists on sticking an align=justify in every <DIV> statement, and I have to go through with a text editor and delete that stuff after the fact.

Your cover image works fine. Good job on that.

Thank you.

Do you have the desktop reader? It's free and will allow you to test the files you create.

Yes. I have Mobi Reader for the desktop, and Mobi Creator is set to call it to display the built PRC for debugging. I also test with Mobi reader 5.3 on my Palm OS device.

I'm uploading a new version that does neuter the forced justification, and I experimented with putting in the Guide info, but I suspect that doesn't work. (It doesn't seem to here, but I'm still wrapping my head around what is required to specify that correctly.)

Thanks for the report. that's the sort of feedback I wanted. Try this one and tell me what you get.
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Dennis

[cmbs]

Ok. You do seem to have fixed the justification.

You now have in the guide Find, Cover Page, and Table of Contents but they are not linked.

In Mobi Creator, on the Guide page . . .
1. In the first box, write the title of the page - this is what will show in the guide.
2. In the second box, select what type of page it is - for table of contents, choose toc.
3. In the third box, give the url to the toc. You're going to have to give the table of contents an id (which presumably you've already done with the chapters and maybe have already done with the toc as well). You need to put the correct link that will take you to the table of contents in the document into that third box called "filename." I can't see your html so I can't tell you exactly what would be the correct url. It will be the name-of-the-file#id, or if your table of contents is on it's own page, it will just be the name of the file (including file type - ".html").
The url will look something like: The Wailing Asteroid.html#toc
4. Leave the fourth box empty.

Don't forget to click "update" at the bottom of the guide page when you're done, that saves the changes.

[cmbs]

Your file size is also smaller because you got rid of that extra html (align=justify over and over again)

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by cmbs

Your file size is also smaller because you got rid of that extra html (align=justify over and over again)

And I got rid of a boatload of nbsp's BD insists on putting in front of every <DIV>.

Uploading v1.1, which should also fix the Guide entries. (It seems to here.)
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

A new build of Murray Leinster's The Wailing Asteroid, which fixes the forced full justification, and adds Guide entries for Table of Contents and Start Page.

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Dennis