Old game walkthroughs (ASCII art/fixed-width)

[ownedbycats]

I have a bunch of old game walkthroughs from GameFAQs and the like. Several of them have ASCII art like this:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/917...ion/faqs/14654

Should I just stick to an external viewer for these? I like the search in ebook-viewer but it really doesn't render correctly.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

I have a bunch of old game walkthroughs from GameFAQs and the like. Several of them have ASCII art like this:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/917...ion/faqs/14654

Should I just stick to an external viewer for these? I like the search in ebook-viewer but it really doesn't render correctly.

The viewer will work just fine. All you have to do is specify a fixed width font such as Courier New.

[ownedbycats]

Unfortunately, monospaced fonts don't seem to help much.

[kovidgoyal]

Put them in <pre> blocks and switch the viewer to flow mode and you should be fine.

[DNSB]

Could you try this rather simple version of FAQ that you linked to and let me know how it views. Likely one of the simplest ebooks I've ever done since virtually all of the text is wrapped in a single <pre>...</pre> pair. It may give you some ideas about how to handle these files.

[ownedbycats]

That works. I'll try it with others. Thank you.

[DNSB]

You're welcome. <straining arm while patting my back>

[ownedbycats]

For anyone else who comes across this thread in the future, adding this to stylesheet.css improves converted txt > ePub walkthroughs a bit:

pre {
   font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;
   font-size: 10px;
   white-space: pre-wrap; 
}

Font size helps it better fit into the default window size, and white-space helps with a mild Chromium wrapping bug.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

For anyone else who comes across this thread in the future, adding this to stylesheet.css improves converted txt > ePub walkthroughs a bit:

pre {
   font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;
   font-size: 10px;
   white-space: pre-wrap; 
}

Font size helps it better fit into the default window size, and white-space helps with a mild Chromium wrapping bug.

10px ?
Shouldn't that be 10pt (which is also scalable )?

[ownedbycats]

Both of them seem to work, though 10pt is visibly larger than 10px.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Both of them seem to work, though 10pt is visibly larger than 10px.

Did you try and zoom the text? My understanding is px is an absolute, like in or cm.

BTW there is nothing sacred about the 10 value, it was a standard typewriter size

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by theducks

10px ?
Shouldn't that be 10pt (which is also scalable )?

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Both of them seem to work, though 10pt is visibly larger than 10px.

A couple of comments:

I would have used 0.625em for the font size and since pre presumes a fixed width font, the font-family declaration should not be needed. At least, calibre and Sigil don't seem to care about the font family and my Kobos don't seem to need it either though I do have a monospace font installed on them.

I admit to being rather surprised that unlike Sigil's preview and it's three test renderers or ADE, calibre's ebook viewer did some strange things when the screen was set to a narrow width.

[ownedbycats]

good call on the 0.625em -- I was just mostly waffling around trying to get it to look okay.

I didn't get the cut-off text. Are you using paged or flow mode? Kovid mentioned that in my ticket.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

good call on the 0.625em -- I was just mostly waffling around trying to get it to look okay.

I didn't get the cut-off text. Are you using paged or flow mode? Kovid mentioned that in my ticket.

Paged mode.