Humor Jerome, Jerome K.: Three Men in a Boat (illustrated) v6 07 april 2010

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by orwell2k

Apart from being a cracking good book, your efforts to create this ePub version are outstanding! Maybe you will turn your ePub arts to creating a version of Three men On The Brummel?

the thought had crossed my mind, yes. (it's a question of finding the time, really.)

Can you give a quick summary of what tools you use to create your ePubs?

i wanted to learn about the format, so i did it all by hand. i used dreamweaver for the html and css code, since that is what i use for my work (webdesigner) already, and notepad as well if memory serves. i could have done *all* the work in notepad ; i wrote the code myself rather than using a conversion app, and you don't need any special app to write code. and to be honest i don't recomment dreamweaver ; it doesn't handle long(ish) text flows very well, so sometimes it was really slow and sometimes it crashed, and i had a few very strange problems with it. if i were doing it now, i would use sigil and a text editor when necessary (search and replace, for instance).

I am a big FB2 fan, and to be honest this ePub book is the first one that looks decent on my BeBook (Hanlin V3). A lot of the problem is the reader implementation itself, but if publishers put half your effort into creating their ePubs, then perhaps most of the currently available ePub ebooks out there wouldn't look like crap on the reader. Perhaps it's what you get used to, but for displaying on the Hanlin FB2 (CoolReader) is far superior to ePub.

i agree that there is still a way to go in terms of reader implementation and also well-crafted ebooks. but i am optimistic that both will improve in the near future ; the reader apps are improving already and the epub support is starting to get really good (the Opus for instance has excellent epub support), and publishers are more and more starting to take ebooks seriously. let's hope we don't have to wait too long !

But as I said, this ePub eBook is just outstanding - well done, great effort and many thanks!!

thank you ! i am so glad you like it. enjoy the book !

[Bilbo1967]

Well, gosh - that's just amazing, thankyou so much ZP.

JKJ was a writer from just down the road from where I live and I have read this a few times before and have it on my 505 from somewhere else. That version will now be removed and replaced with this (far, far superior) version.

[cian]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

if you want to create a similar effect, you can find fonts with decorative capitals on dafont.com ; take a look in the "initials" category for instance. you can either make an image of the letter you need, or embed the font directly. be sure to check the font licence ; many of the fonts are free and can be distributed, but not all of them.

Wow. That's perfect. Thank you very much.

[cian]

A really good text editor for this kind of thing is notepad++. It has modes for CSS/HTML/XML. Also there are good tools for HTML/CSS manipulation for firefox. Its best to set up a new profile (or use a portable edition), as they slow down normal browsing.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Bilbo1967

Well, gosh - that's just amazing, thankyou so much ZP.

JKJ was a writer from just down the road from where I live and I have read this a few times before and have it on my 505 from somewhere else. That version will now be removed and replaced with this (far, far superior) version.

i'm very happy you like it, bilbo. he was a brilliant writer.

Originally Posted by cian

Wow. That's perfect. Thank you very much.

glad to help.

Originally Posted by cian

A really good text editor for this kind of thing is notepad++. It has modes for CSS/HTML/XML. Also there are good tools for HTML/CSS manipulation for firefox. Its best to set up a new profile (or use a portable edition), as they slow down normal browsing.

thanks for the tip ! i will look into notepad++. i do most of the code writing in sigil, but that could be very handy nonetheless.

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

i'm very happy you like it, bilbo. he was a brilliant writer.


glad to help.



thanks for the tip ! i will look into notepad++. i do most of the code writing in sigil, but that could be very handy nonetheless.

An editor I would recommend is SciTE ... handles css/xhtml & the toc and contents no problem at all .....

[kjk]

Just checked out how this looks in the new Txtr iPhone reader app-
It really maintains a lot more of the ePub formatting than Stanza, but the interface needs some work Looks gorgeous though!

http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/7103/3men.jpg

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by kjk

Just checked out how this looks in the new Txtr iPhone reader app-
It really maintains a lot more of the ePub formatting than Stanza, but the interface needs some work Looks gorgeous though!

http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/7103/3men.jpg

thank you very much for that screenshot ! i don't have an iphone so i can't test anything there but it's great to get an idea of how the book is displayed. i'm actually quite impressed, the txtr app looks like it retains quite a lot of the formatting. that is great to know.

[cklammer]

(Please see the attachment screenshot)
(Note: the copyright warning is attached by the Mobileread forum software.)

This work is assumed to be in the Life+70 public domain OR the copyright holder has given specific permission for distribution. Copyright laws differ throughout the world, and it may still be under copyright in some countries. Before downloading, please check your country's copyright laws. If the book is under copyright in your country, do not download or redistribute this work.

To report a copyright violation you can contact us here.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by cklammer

(Please see the attachment screenshot)
(Note: the copyright warning is attached by the Mobileread forum software.)

thank you cklammer. it's great to see that the formatting is holding up on so many different reading apps. that means we've got a lot of really excellent options out there for reading our books however we prefer, so props to the developpers.

[tompe]

I am testing the ePub firmware on my Gen3 and looked at this book. There are some problems:

The top margin is too small. The text is cut by the black "border" or if not cut it is so near that it looks to be cut and also the shadow when reading can be one line thick so you need a top margin.

I cannot disable justification.

The body font has high x-height so I think you need more leading. Also with a reader with no hyphenation and justified text the lines are to close to each other.

[bremler]

Hi Zelda, I just wanted to add to the praise for your efforts. This book looks absolutely amazing on my sony prs505, and since I am new to creating epub, and learning html/css, I am inspired by you to create some nice looking ones too. What I love is that I can learn how to do things by viewing your source code, and the text wrapping around the illustrations is breathtaking, something that really adds to the reading experience. Congratulations !

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by tompe

I am testing the ePub firmware on my Gen3 and looked at this book. There are some problems:

The top margin is too small. The text is cut by the black "border" or if not cut it is so near that it looks to be cut and also the shadow when reading can be one line thick so you need a top margin.

I cannot disable justification.

The body font has high x-height so I think you need more leading. Also with a reader with no hyphenation and justified text the lines are to close to each other.

thanks for the feedback tompe. i think a lot of those details are out of my hands (dependent on the epub renderer) but i'll definitely take a look.

Originally Posted by bremler

Hi Zelda, I just wanted to add to the praise for your efforts. This book looks absolutely amazing on my sony prs505, and since I am new to creating epub, and learning html/css, I am inspired by you to create some nice looking ones too. What I love is that I can learn how to do things by viewing your source code, and the text wrapping around the illustrations is breathtaking, something that really adds to the reading experience. Congratulations !

i'm very glad you like it, bremler, and i'm really happy to hear that you're going to learn to make good-looking epub books. it can really be fun to try to make the nicest code possible. you can learn a lot in our epub forum and don't hesitate to ask questions. i had a lot of fun playing with the code and making this book. i was also really excited about the wrapped illustrations ; jellby did a lot of work on that code and the end solution wouldn't have been nearly as elegant without him. it's definitely one of my favourite details.

[ShellShock]

I like your use of Fontin--I have just got turned on to this font, and have made it my default. Nice to see I you are already using it.

[zelda_pinwheel]

thanks to Jellby, corrected many many (...many...) typos and formatting errors. many thanks and karma to him for taking the trouble to make notes of all those little details. version 6 uploaded.