Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related Fanfic in epub formats - archive anywhere?

I was excited to find you had done my "Lois Lane, Last Will and Testament" story and I loaded onto my reader. It worked great. Just a small comment though. Your story titles are humongous compared to the size of the text. I have to read at the M setting because the type at S (which is where it starts and loads best) is too small for me to read.
Are we constrained to use the type on the Archive?
And what is that size? Courier 10? Even the Archive is too small for me to read and that is one of the reasons I put the stories into Word and use Arial 12.
regards
Artemis

Yeah, the story titles are meant to really be on a title page of a book, I think (but since we don't do title pages with fanfics, and I didn't want to change things THAT much, it's a bit out of place). On a computer screen it looks fairly nice, but I suspect it's big on an e-book reader. *g* Haven't figured out exactly how else I'd like to do it--heading size is hierarchical, so one has to be careful or the TOC will look rather odd.

The font size for ordinary text, I think is a default thing. I don't think I have any control over it, other than to mark things with heading numbers (which then enters them into the TOC--not something you want for an ordinary paragraph!). So I guess you'll have to keep flipping them to the medium size. My e-book reader has 9 levels of zoom with epubs, lol, and usually the 2nd level (one zoom click) is very comfortable for my eyes. Enjoy the fic!

As of a moment ago we have 96 stories converted and available on the epub site. I'm sure we'll pass 100 before tomorrow morning.

I have noticed one minor but irritating issue with these conversions when I'm using Stanza on my iPhone. When I load a story, everything seems to be correct except that Stanza is not picking up the title properly. Every story that I've tried comes across with the title shown as 's' in the ebook directory. Once you open the document, the title is correct, but I've had to fix the outside title by manually changing it after loading. Strangely enough the author comes through correctly.

I would ask that others try to download some of these and let us know if you see this or any other problems with these conversions. If we need to fix anything, it will be much easier now than when there are 500, 1000 or more that have been converted.

Bob

Congratulations, Bob! I just dl "Hottest Team in Town" and the title was fine in the list. I have a Pocket Sony Reader. So no problems here.
regards
Artemis

Just tried the add-on for Firefox called EPUBReader and it works great! For anyone who'd like to read the epubs in-browser (and have the nice formatting and chapter navigation and all), once you install it, you just click on an epub link and it loads in a new tab ready to read.

I added the link to the wiki page all about epubs so anyone can grab it.

With Sony Reader on my computer, the epub came right up ready to read the minute I dl it. No need for the Firefox add on. I do have Firefox, though and it's a great idea.
Thanks for all your hard work.
regards
Artemis

Is it possible to add the summaries to the wiki pages?
I find archives which tell me nothing about to expect from a story pretty useless and I can't remember all of them just by title and author from the main archives.

Well, I think the point is to eventually merge the two (add the epubs from the wiki to the Archive), and having all the summaries would make adding the links on the wiki more difficult for those of us contributing. I recommend simply having two tabs open--one of the Archive, one of the wiki (whether you're doing it by author or by title doesn't matter since you can choose either one in both locations)--and go through the fics that way. Then you can read the summaries on the Archive and grab the matching epubs you want.

Just had an interesting thought come up, and was discussing with Bob; it occurred to me to have some other people test things in actual e-book readers (this excludes Stanza Desktop, as well as the Firefox add-in).

If you have an e-book reader of some sort that handles epubs natively (Nook or iPad or whatever else out there; Kindle being the big exception), would you download a copy of Nan's fic Teamwork as epub and test it out? I'd like to hear what the TOC navigation experience is like. Can you hit the top of the fic by going to the title, above all the chapters, or does it only let you go to the second layer of the TOC and just choose a chapter to go to? I only have the Astak, you see, which is very limited in TOC navigation, and I'm wondering if the others are as limited, or whether they have other options.

(The Astak, to note, is not a touchscreen device--it uses E-ink--and only has the numbers 0-9 as input options, plus a select and a quit button. It also is limited to 8 options per screen before having to "turn the page", meaning more than eight chapters in a fic, and one has to flip the page just to see the ninth chapter to select . . .)

If I read the doc correctly adding a file called in the wiki conf directory and putting

in that file will let you open the file in Stanza directly on a mobile device like my iPod Touch. I can currently get to the epubs but what I get is the raw file shown in a Stanza browser window.

Not having a doku wiki to experiment on I can't be sure that works.

Doku wiki Mime doc
Stanza developer doc Near the bottom under Links in Book Descriptions.

Hmm, no clue how that would work. There's got to be an easy way--usually you sync a device with a computer library. Calibre appears to do that rather well. (I create my own directory structure on my e-book reader so I don't use it much, but it will manage it all for you if you don't want to handle it, and it supports a ton of different devices.)

Sorry, got behind in this thread.

Michael wrote:

That'd be cool! It'd take time -- and lots of procedural changes. LabRat and her General Editors would need to be heavily involved.

AbiWord and Google Docs do an impressive job of reading Word files. Do they support Word's change tracking? Not a clue. Google Docs has its own version of it though.

I didn't know that. At work we use 2003, and that's the latest I've used.

Excellent point. Not sure how we'd implement, but we'd certainly want to be consistent.

Artemis wrote:

Interesting. I'd love to poll the General Editors to find out what word processors they use to work with authors -- and what they'd be willing to use. And for that matter, what authors currently use and would be willing to use.

How important is change tracking? Does everyone use it?

Dcarson wrote re the wiki conf directory:

I'll give that a try (hope it won't keep the Firefox epubreader plug-in from working). Left-clicking the epub filename in Firefox was bringing up the raw file for me too until I installed the epubreader plug-in Doranwen recommended. Right-clicking worked to download it though. Internet Explorer, however, brings up the download dialog box with no problems.

I'm using Stanza on the iPod Touch too. Are you getting the raw file problem there? How are you pulling down the epubs? These are the steps that work for me:

* In iPod/iPhone Stanza, tap Get Books at the bottom of the library screen.
* Tap the + plus sign at the top of the Get Books screen. (If you've recently downloaded something, you may need to tap "Edit" first.)
* In the input field where it asks for "Valid ePub/eReader URL," finger-type this: lcfanfic.com/epub/cause.epub -- or any "filename.epub" (To find out the story's filename, hover over its epub link in your computer's web browser.)
* Tap the blue Download button in the upper-right corner to bring the story into your library.

That's a lot to go through. I don't know if there's a way to do it by tapping on the link from Safari, but will give the mime thing a go.

Best wishes,

Lauren

I can only talk about my couple of fics, but every time I upload one, my GE's first suggestion was Word+Change Tracking.

To me, it's certainly the tool with the least amount of friction when it comes to editing and I wouldn't want to miss it for the world

Michael

I couldn't track where this came from, but that's not true.
The later ones, 2007 and 2010, can read the earlier ones and load them in a "compatibility mode".
Earlier versions cannot read .docx from 2007 on. So if you want everyone to be able to read the word doc, you must put them in 2003.
I guess I don't really understand why the simple reader, not an editor, needs elaborate document tracking and a detailed TOC. You don't have that in a book. If you forgot something in the plot as a reader, a simple word search is adequate, IMHO.
Hope I'm helping and not confusing the issues.
Artemis
P.S. Having thought a little longer, I see where epub doesn't care what version of word originated it, but Word to Word, my statement holds.

Artemis, that came from me. And I was talking about the doc-format (Word 2003 doc), as in the doc-extension and opposed to docx.

And as far as doc is concerned, once all clients are Word 2003 and above, you don't have troubles with doc. Plus, I believe you get more/better 3rd-party support (Open Office, etc) with doc, since its older. Back with Word-XP, Word-2000, Word-98, the doc-format always meant backward compatibility issues and you had to make sure which version exactly you saved to if you needed to talk to older clients. Now, with doc vs. docx you can simply ensure this via the extension (since Word kindly saves Word-2007 only as docx)

The entire subject of DOC-files only concerned the communication between authors and GEs, not the final product on the Archive, IIRC. Right now that happens in plain-text, again for compatibility reasons between Labby, GE and author. And, unless my impression is off big time, most GE/author communication is happening using doc-format and files that got converted to plain-text, back to doc, and then again to plain-text for uploading.

Hope that clears it up

Michael

Edit:
Oh, and yeah, there's the compatibility pack so Word 2003 supports docx as well, but that means a separate download etc and that's not something you want to require from somebody you want to share a document with

Thanks for that, Michael. Yes, I definitely see the utility of change tracking in the editing process, GE to author and back. I was just confused as to why that would relate to the final product's conversion to epub. So it should be no concern to the people converting someone else's story.
regards
Artemis

I just noticed that the stories submitted in January are all available in multiple formats.

That's cool! And great work

Michael

It is, indeed, very cool. Well done, Lauren!

LabRat

i can read epub files on my nookbook device along with pdf files. The zip epub files won't work on a nookbook.

Hi Shelly:
The epubs are not zipped. Look here for folcs who did older stories: http://www.lcfanfic.com/wiki/doku.php