Thanks for the thanks and enthusiasm, LabRat, Lynn, Michael, Queen of the Capes, Artemis and Deja Vu.
Michael, your converter sounds cool. And please write some new fanfic!
Michael wrote about the epub files accessible from the wiki:
Any plans for migrating the stories into the main archive?
Yes, but it'll take a while.
the new formats are only linked on the What's New page, not on the Author and Title pages. Hope you don't mind me mentioning it.
Not at all. We're on two tracks: New stories going forward (via the What's New page) and older stories as we get to them (via the wiki). And they'll intersect when all stories in the archive have been reformatted for consistency (about 800 finished so far) and the database is driving the site. That's when all formats will be available from all the catalog pages. When will that be? Uhhh... [takes nervous look at growing collection of programming books]
Speaking of the wiki, Doranwen deserves a round of applause for her marathon effort. She looks to be in the process of going through Wendy Richards' stories, and we have about 250 stories in epub format now, the majority of which were converted by Doranwen. On behalf of epub e-reader fans everywhere, thank you, Doranwen!
How's the conversion stuff being handled? Especially, how do you convert the italics etc. stuff to e.g. asterisks for the txt-format? Or are those lost?
You bring up interesting questions, Michael. I'm thinking Word to simple HTML, then a script to convert opening and closing italics tags to asterisks. I'm hoping it'll be that simple. Having seen what kind of tag soup can result from what should be a simple bit of formatting, though -- multiple font, formatting tags on and off within a single sentence, for example (Dreamweaver circa 2000, you still give me nightmares) -- I should know better than to assume, but I'm hoping. And I did buy an XSLT book, along with an XML book, a regular expressions book, a CSS book, and yet another PHP/MySQL book. My eyeballs are spinning, my brain is in shock, but Amazon loves me.
LabRat wrote:
I'm assuming that Lauren will be working on that at some point. At the moment, I assume that she's concentrating on the basics. I know that RL has been pretty much slapping her around lately
Thanks for covering for me, LabRat! Things are beginning to look up.
Artemis wrote:
When I get around to submitting "Nighttime in the Daytime" it has several relevant pictures (.jpg) Any hope of including those too?
I'd love to see an illustrated version of your story, Artemis. It'd be nice to be able to do that on the archive, but it'd add another layer of complexity. Also, I'm a chicken about hosting LnC photos on the site. In the past when TPTB have gone after fan pages, it's usually been for images and other media. Though it's been a long time since I've read about a forced takedown like that, and it hasn't touched our fandom much (some Buffy sites, I remember), it sticks with me.
Artemis, I remember from your previous posts that you like to read PDFs on your e-reader. I hope you don't mind that we're using the PDFs with printing in mind -- thus the two-column format. Are the epub or mobi versions working out for you? Was it you who said the heading size of the title was forcing the size of the body text to be off-kilter, or something like that? We can change that. Please let me know if you have suggestions to improve readability.
Anyone who has a problem with our epubs and mobis, please let me know. I've been testing on Kindle and the iPod Touch Stanza app, but I haven't seen what the files look like in the Sony Reader, the Nook and the universe of other e-readers out there. It's still early in the game, so we can more easily fix problems now.
I think I change my mind every week about little formatting things. Before we pile up a lot of stories for 2011, I'll go back and make things consistent.
But a big change I think we should do soon: offer files in Word .doc instead of OpenOffice's .odt. Even though OpenOffice can read and write Word's .doc, I don't think the reverse is true. And I'm guessing more people have Word instead of OpenOffice, even though OpenOffice is a free alternative. I admit to being an OpenOffice proponent and love the idea of promoting its use, but it'd probably be more practical to put stories out there in Word.
Lauren
