We don't have consensus on what our procedures will be with epubs going forward, but I've found a file upload script to use for getting epubs on the site. Doranwen, bobbart, it's ready for use if we're ready to start collecting them. Thank you for volunteering your time.
Artemis wrote:
I have no objection to my stories, few that they be currently, being posted in other formats. I suspect that if someone from this board posted them elsewhere, I would have no objection either.
That's great to hear! Hoping other authors will feel the same.
I didn't know about the different formats on the Archive. There's been a poll for a long time on the Archive asking if people want stories in HTML. Maybe there's an indication there of interest.
HTML looked to be winning toward the end. It seems inevitable. The stumbling block toward that effort is the sheer number of stories there are to convert. Lots to learn in getting that done. The only place where extra formats are available for stories right now is the Filename Z page. I figured OpenOffice for flexible formatting/printing, PDF for quick printing, and plain text because that's our legacy format. But this is the year of the e-book, so epub is a natural, and a great suggestion from Doranwen!
PDF goes directly to my reader and works perfectly, so I'm happy with that.
I'm glad it worked for you, Artemis! I didn't know any e-readers could do flexible word-wrapping with PDF.
Have you made your own PDFs? If not, I highly recommend it. OpenOffice makes it a piece of cake! The PDF files I posted on the Z page were made using OpenOffice (free, open-source, Microsoft Word-compatible, and
available here in Windows, Mac and Linux flavors). Just a few simple steps:
1) Use the archive Formatter to convert a story from archive text into fluidly wrapped text.
2) Paste the output into OpenOffice Writer, then clean up the header by restoring the line breaks after title, author name, etc.
3) Do whatever formatting you like. (If you're creating the PDF for printing, you might adjust the font styles and sizes, margins, indentation, format the title as a heading and format the story in columns.)
4) Click File/Export PDF.
I was figuring PDF would be used primarily for printing and tried some different layouts. The PDF for Paul's "Zombies" story is in two columns, magazine-style. I don't know how that one would flow in your e-reader, but two columns seems to be an efficient way to print.
I have visions of filling three-ring binders with fanfic. Would be really nice to have a printer that could print on both sides of a sheet of paper. But Doranwen's print-on-demand idea is even better to dream about. Real, bound books! I'd start clearing shelf space now. The complete and collected works of [insert author name here]. Sigh.
And all this from an English major! I'm impressed.
Thanks!
Trying to learn programming is maddening.
Darth Michael wrote:
Hi Lauren! Your vision for the Archive vNext looks great.
Thanks!
The whole talk about automatic document conversion certainly causes some PTSS flashbacks over here. Fortunately for us, novel-type text is quite simple, as far as formatting goes. So, yeah, as soon as you have the document broken up into paragraphs, the rest should be quite doable. At least in C#/.NET.
Argh! Sorry about the PTSS.
I keep saying to myself, "It should be simple!" But I keep stumbling around in the dark. You sound like a guy with a book of matches.
C#/.NET? That stuff looks scary.
bobbart wrote:
For my part I'm all in favor of multiple formats. I'm all for making the documents as accessible as possible. I'll be happy to help and when we get going I'll certainly do what I can. I'm happy to have my own works change format. It's the words and ideas, not the delivery mechanism.
Thanks, bobbart. That's a beautiful way to say it.
However, my suggestion would be to start with all the Kerth stories. If we have to start somewhere, why not there? However, that's just an idea. I'm in favor of whatever we can do.
I think anywhere people would want to start is good.
You're an old-school assembly language programmer? That stuff looks really scary!
Best wishes,
Lauren
P.S. I was working under a bogus assumption about Stanza when I typed this in my previous opus...
Though when I opened an archive text file in Sigil, it knew what to do -- just like Stanza, it stripped the extra line breaks, and all paragraphs were fluidly word-wrapping. AND it did it for both old and new stories with their varied formatting. So, no tedious manual line editing or search/replace routines required. It thought the header block was one paragraph (like my formatter script does), but you can easily "press Enter" to restore the line breaks you do want.
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There is one really nice feature desktop Stanza offers over Sigil: It lets you export a story in various flavors -- HTML, Word, plain text and PDF -- in addition to epub.
The first part is true -- Stanza does strip the extra line breaks from archive format text files, but
only for any epubs you save. I assumed that would also hold true for the Word and PDF files you produce using it. It doesn't. Drat. PDFs and Word files saved from Stanza keep those line breaks intact.
But hey, there's still the archive Formatter.
