4 ms·
This is a great project! Sadly SE has a focus on ePub and similar formats. These are impossible from a typographical standpoint. Text in ePub reader apps always
by jpfr 8y ago
This is a great project!
Sadly SE has a focus on ePub and similar formats. These are impossible from a typographical standpoint. Text in ePub reader apps always comes out with a ragged right or impossible word breaks.
Latex with the microtype package is the only solution that does text justification on the level of a human professional. Can’t SE convert to that and provide PDF for common screen sizes?
It would be so easy if only Project Gutenberg had a standardized master source format. So conversion tools can be built around that. But all efforts in that direction were killed of by trolls in the community.
- jimpudar 8y agoAll the source files of standardebooks.org books are up on Github, it might be possible to write a script to automatically convert the files to LaTeX.
- lou1306 8y agoPandoc [0] could probably do most of the heavy lifting, starting from the ePub files (after all, an ePub is just an archive containing HTML, CSS, images, and metadata) [0]: http://pandoc.org/ http://pandoc.org/
- gavinpc 8y agoI spent a lot of time with Gutenberg epubs in a former life, and I found that their quality was far better than most other digitizers with comparable scale. However, the tables of contents were extremely inconsistent and I had to essentially rewrite them to get anything like a usable outline. SE looks interesting. I don't have an epub reader handy but I will definitely be back to understand the motivation (knowing it's a lot of work to do this sort of thing).
- robin_reala 8y agoSE books all have rebuilt ToCs, yes. Gutenberg’s ones follow the presentation of the original scans, which basically isn’t useful for an ereading experience.