Glowfic Ebooks

[latanius]

Relevant, formerly anonymous person here :) It's good to hear that the e-books actually work on devices other than my Kindle; extensive testing is not one of the things that was done to them.

Also, coming up next: an HTML mirror! (... after all, epubs are mostly HTML.) @Kappa: CSS classes for moieties are entirely doable, thanks for the idea! As for multiple threads: would we like something like "some separator between threads", or put them on separate pages, or... any other ideas?

Plus what about replacing the symbellas with little png pics with the same char somewhere in the converter? Not sure whether they'd look sufficiently nice on every platform / font size, but it's low-tech enough to work everywhere I guess.

[DanielH]

Are there epub readers that have trouble with font embedding? I think that would be easier (EpubLib already supports font embedding, but I’m not sure about font subsetting).

I’m working on something with the threading by making them separate sections in a single file, with <hr />s in between. I suppose it might make more sense to add them as separate chapters, but they’re really subchapters and I think the HTML structure should support that. The downside is that giant files might take longer to load on some readers, but I’m not sure breaking it at the thread boundaries is the right way to handle that anyway.

In the course of testing this thread handling, I’ve found some bugs in runner.sh; I’m not sure how to fix all of them, so I’m opening an issue on GitHub with details.

[Kappa]

Multiple threads on a single top-level page should probably count as separate threads, or things are going to get weird when you hit the sandboxes. Some kind of subchaptery solution would also work. But separate pages would also make file size less painful for the big ones.

[DanielH]

Ah, yes, I’d forgotten those sandboxes. I guess it is potentially important to repeat the intro (the actual post instead of the comments) at the top of each thread, then? That certainly will make things easier in the one Incandescence page with multiple threads and in the sandboxes, but that part usually isn’t relevant to reread every time in Effulgence.

On an unrelated note, Announcements keeps turning read again. Might it be time for this thread to be moved to Creations?

[latanius]

@DanielH: I might have fixed some bugs in runner.sh (... quite a few things didn't make too much sense), could you check whether we were thinking of the same things? I just pushed them to the repo.

Also, we have a half-done HTML output stage, too; at the moment, it does something like your solution, with <hr/>-s. No CSS yet though. If you're hacking on the chapter divisions, I could start with the moiety stuff & some CSS so that the two won't conflict, how about that?

By the way, how reasonable is the assumption of "pages tend do contain a couple threads that are linear from that on"? (It worked for Effulgence so far.)

(and if anyone needs all ~400MB of the dreamwidth.org snapshot zipped up, let me know!)

[Kappa]

What does "pages tend do contain a couple threads that are linear from that on" mean, exactly?

[DanielH]

Yeah, I’ll take the threads.

What the threads comment means is that a page may have one or more top-level comments, but each comment only has one or no children. You won’t have a chapter split into multiple threads except at the very beginning.

[Alicorn]

This is correct for most things but false for at least one sandbox (Barbecue Forks), which splits a ways in when Soph and Delilah go upstairs and Neville and Bella stay downstairs.

[DanielH]

Oh, yeah, I’d forgotten about that one. I think it’s the only one like that, but I’m not sure. That makes proper thread handling harder.

I’m thinking the right way to do it is to have each comment have a “repeated Comment children” field. Then, every time there’s a split, treat it as a new thread starting. At the top of each thread, top-level or not, there’s an hr and a back-link to the parent (intro or previous comment). A back-link works best because it can be followed if appropriate (as for sandboxes or the Incandescent split), or not followed if appropriate (as for most Effulgence threads). Perhaps later we can add an option to split top-level threads into separate chapters, but this should work for now.

One thing I’m not sure about the above proposal is whether or not to add links to each thread from the parent. That would be nice in some cases, but would be redundant for many of the sandboxes and would be harder to do. I’m leaning towards “no, don’t do that”, but am open to persuasion or other suggestions.

And I take back what I said earlier about moiety being the right thing for you to work on. I think working on the Issue #2 I opened, about failing with a missing icon, is more important because that causes a defect in the already published ebooks instead of a nice improvement. I tried looking at it but couldn’t figure it out, and it looks like you changed that area of the code anyway.

[DanielH]

I really like Kappa’s moiety suggestion. I’ve made changes to my local copy—just adding three lines of css—from the github head to work with moiety, and although I don’t think most people would like my exact settings (dark on dark), I can’t imagine reading a longform glowfic without this anymore.

For the curious, my three lines of CSS (plus comment) are:

Code: Select all

  /* Moiety colors */
  .belltower header { /* Alicorn is green */ background-color: green }
  .binary_heat header { /* kappa is purple */ background-color: purple }
  .aestrices header { /* Aestrix is blue */ background-color: blue }

EDIT: This now works with the github repo listed.