01-24-2009, 11:05 AM | #1 |
frumious Bandersnatch
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"La divina commedia" test
Hello,
As some of you know, I'm preparing an illustrated multilingual edition of Dante's "La divina commedia". Since it's being a bit more involved than I foresaw at first, I'd like to share what I've done so far and get some comments, mainly about formatting and usability. I have the original Italian and the English translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I'll try to find at least translations into Spanish, French and German. I could also include several translations for each language, but I'm afraid that would be too much. The Italian and English versions are (going to be) cross-linked. At the moment there is a link to the other language at the beginning of each "Canto", and the first Canto in the Inferno has cross-links every 15 verses (adding these links for the whole thing is going to be tedious). I have also included the beautiful woodcuts by Gustave Doré. I'm currently re-extracting and enhancing them from existing scans, so in the future they will have better quality, but they are very good now anyway. Instead of putting each illustration in the text, I put only a thumbnail, which is a link to the full-size illustration. There is also a gallery of miniatures at the beginning. I'm awaiting your comments and suggestions. |
01-24-2009, 11:17 AM | #2 |
zeldinha zippy zeldissima
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first of all, i want to applaud you for this project, which i'm really in admiration of. i've taken a look at your sample file and for the most part it looks quite good to me. excellent choice to put Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights on the cover. i also do appreciate the cross-linking between versions, and the gallery of images at the beginning is very nice.
a couple of remarks : - is it possible to reduce the greyed-out portion of the cover, to see more of the illustration ? i think it is worth it. also, take care with black text on a grey background, it might not be the most legible choice. maybe use a lighter grey, or use a black background and white text instead. - i'm not sure whether this is your choice or mobipocket, but i think a serif font is much nicer for reading longer texts, and particularly here the sans serif seems out of place to me. - i'm curious also about the thumbnail images in the body of the text ; why not include the full-size versions ? they are so stunning it's a shame not to be able to appreciate them unless you click on the link. and while i'm reading, i don't like to have to navigate back and forth very much, i'd rather have the illustrations linearly in the text. this shouldn't make any difference in the weight of the file, is there another reason you made this choice ? anyway i'm really looking forward to seeing how this goes ! thanks for this. |
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01-24-2009, 11:44 AM | #3 | |||
frumious Bandersnatch
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1. The images being large, they usually take a whole screen (at least the portrait-oriented ones, and in the next version I plan to have landscape images rotated, anyway), so they are not so much "in line". The page before the image is half blank and sometimes the page with the image has a single line of text. This is with a 600x800 screen. 2. With the current version of mobiperl (what I use to create mobipocket files), if an image is referenced multiple times, it gets included in the mobi file also multiple times. So including the full-size image in line with every language version would make the file huge. Including the whole set of thumbnails multiple times is much more acceptable. |
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01-24-2009, 11:45 AM | #4 |
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Oops wrong thread. Sorry sorry sorry
Last edited by mtravellerh; 01-24-2009 at 11:47 AM. |
01-24-2009, 11:53 AM | #5 | ||||
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01-24-2009, 12:12 PM | #6 | |
frumious Bandersnatch
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It might happen that mobigen (or whatever its name is) does not have the same behaviour, but if I understand the web page correctly, it will always reduce the image size below ~64kB. With mobiperl, at least, I know how to prevent this quality reduction, and I know the resulting mobi file works fine in the desktop reader and in the Cybook. If this problem is solved, I may try again having the full-size images in line. And I'll probably do it that way with the ePUB version (if I live long enough to do it ). |
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01-24-2009, 12:18 PM | #7 | |||
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01-24-2009, 12:21 PM | #8 | |
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01-24-2009, 12:30 PM | #9 | |
frumious Bandersnatch
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More troublesome, for me, is uploading time. My internet connection is not so great, it takes me ~5 minutes to upload this 12MB file. A 60MB file would take 25 minutes... and although it's less than half an hour, it's too long for uploading a book, I believe. The other reason is more "aesthetic". I think it's a waste of resources to use 60MB for something that should take only 12MB, it just doesn't look right. But, as I said, I'm not blaming anything on you. Mobiperl is already a great tool! |
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01-25-2009, 11:58 AM | #10 |
frumious Bandersnatch
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Oh my God! I'm up to the neck in the mess of translations
If you know of a good translation (into any language), free of copyright and available online, please tell me. When I had almost finished with the French Purgatory, I realized that the Wikisource text is by an unknown translator. The cover page had one name, the comments proposed other different names, but as far as I could tell (comparing with scans and other sources), the text does not match any known translation. So out of Purgatory and back to Hell |
01-25-2009, 02:12 PM | #11 | |
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"aesthetic" is a good reason. Against that is the risk to introduce bugs when you have to have more complex code. |
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01-25-2009, 02:34 PM | #12 |
frumious Bandersnatch
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Hmmm... No, it's not only one image, it's every image that's referenced multiple times (and it's included as many times as referenced). Maybe you are thinking of the cover image being included twice if no thumbnail is given, that's probably the same (or very similar) issue, but I agree it would be minor if it only affected a single image. However, in this case it would affect all 135 illustrations (thats 8MB even with the 64kB limit), every time I reference the illustrations, the filesize would increase at least 8MB...
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01-25-2009, 03:21 PM | #13 |
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Here's a Russian translation:
http://lib.ru/POEZIQ/DANTE/comedy.txt The date specified is 1982, but apparently it only applies to the foreword: the translation itself was done 1940s, and the translator died in 1955, so I guess it is in public domain now. |
01-25-2009, 09:59 PM | #14 | |
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01-26-2009, 04:53 AM | #15 | ||
frumious Bandersnatch
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Also, I use html2mobi, with a simple HTML file (with some mobipocket-specific markup and a <guide> in the <head>). Doesn't oeb2mobi need an additional structure? Quote:
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