Alicornutopia

The sandbox index updates really fast, but it would potentially be nice to have that in downloadable form too for people to enjoy light offline reading of it.

Ok, I've updated quite a few things!

The styling's kinda different, it actually has the last link in the table of contents, images should be more consistent in size, the user info boxes shouldn't split across pages, and it should load quicker and be compatible with more devices; I've split the larger chapters up into multiple HTML documents - there's a note if a chapter continues on to the next page at a split, since (my reader, iBooks, at least) splits them by HTML page. It was a warning generated by Calibre, so I thought I'd follow it.

Here's the new epub link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z96adsdlf6l0l ... .epub?dl=0

Here's the new link with the code to generate the epub:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4hv8qsxsc41oe ... b.zip?dl=0

To anyone who cares about it, in the code I've removed the ability to create an HTML library of the files - instead, it will just generate the epub. Most of the files have been condensed into a single one, and a few potential issues should have been fixed. If you download the code and run "runner.sh" (provided you've got the proper libraries installed and you're on linux), it should work. It doesn't actually need the "output" folder, but it'll mean you don't have to re-download all the images from dreamwidth. Also, in theory, if a chapter hasn't had any changes, it will download the first, last, and 2nd-to-last pages of the flat version, notice that they're exactly the same as what it has cached, and not download the other files, which should speed up the generation after you've run it once.

I still haven't looked at the sandbox thing, but it should be easier with the new changes I've made.

Uh, well, not sure if this actually affects anything in the Incandescence epub, but it turns out I was handling branches kinda weirdly? (I only noticed when I did Effulgence with the code instead)

I've updated things, and I'm not sure if it's the only change I've made since last time, but in case there were any instances where branches were funny, they should be fixed now. I read everything after Clannish with the epub, but there were a few points when branches seemed a tad off - I'm not sure if they actually were weird, or not, since there was at least one instance where a branch consisted of just a single post, but they should be fixed now. I'm pretty sure that the clannish branches were in the other order on the previous epub, but I'm not sure.

Well, here's the new epub (seems to be the same link, actually...):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z96adsdlf6l0l ... .epub?dl=0

Here's the new code:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4hv8qsxsc41oe ... b.zip?dl=0

And if anyone wants my version of Effulgence, it was done a while ago, but I only just noticed the branch issue, so that's fixed now. It doesn't have a font embedded for the symbols (I think they're called symbellas?), but it seems to render fine on an iPhone, at least (quite a few of them seem to be emoji), and it has the small number of changes since the other Effulgence ePub was updated:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z32uklddjm57v ... .epub?dl=0

(And the code I used:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/gorrfyzqokdzn ... e.zip?dl=0 )

The other Effulgence epub is probably better for wider consumption, since it's tried and tested, but I thought I'd share my one anyway, in case someone really needs the most recent update and doesn't care too much how well everything works. :P

If you say the Effulgence that's up now is better for wider consumption I guess I'll leave that up, but updating incandescence now.

I’ll rerun my Effulgence script tonight, and if all goes well give updated ePubs then.

I remember the branching weirdness. I ended up adding a check in my script to say that if there are only two branches, and the first is only one post long, then pretend that it doesn’t really branch. This happens when the authors accidentally reply to the second-most-recent comment instead of the most recent one.

I hope that over Thanksgiving I’ll have time to go through my code and Throne3d’s and see which features we both support. His definitely has some advantages, like working on Incandescence and including the descriptions of the icons. I’m not sure if those descriptions will work quite as well in Effulgence, though (for example, it would be disconcerting to have text at the top of a lot of Jarvis comments which says “# extremely unobtrusive”).

My code is kinda different between the Incandescence and the Effulgence part, but I think it's mostly just interpreting the ToC part differently, or at least, it was, until I found a bunch of things that Effulgence did that Incandescence didn't that made it weird, then fixed those, then didn't fix my Incandescence script with that - for example, at one point in Effulgence, the post has no userpic, which I didn't have it handle with Incandescence because I didn't realise it needed it.

The text giving the description of the image was there mostly because I didn't bother to cut it out of the image's alt text, which is how I decided to go about it, and because I actually find that kind of useful when reading (to know what the image is supposed to represent, instead of just what it is). I'm sure I could remove that if I wanted, but I didn't decide to at the time.

I might actually fix that branching thing like you said. It's a bit weird to have "There's a branch point starting here!" [then a post] "The previous branch has ended! A new branch has started!" [a load of posts].

I've also modified some CSS, since I'm not really sure how well the previous styling was working (nor how cross-compatible it was...).

The new one works better with calibre, seems to still work nicely on iOS, and handles things a little bit better.

This time it is a new link, since I'm not sure if maybe the old one will work better, but I've re-done my version of both Incandescence (shouldn't affect it much) and Effulgence (probably has quite a few small changes) - the long usernames (and picture text) will have caused it to display differently from how it does now. The image should stay centred along the top bar now, even with long text, and the CSS is, I think, a bit more accurate, instead of working (sort of) by chance.

Incandescence:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1wryzj09m0ihf ... .epub?dl=0

Code:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/u1qzn6ddsc15s ... e.zip?dl=0

Effulgence:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bpcn91jq8b11z ... .epub?dl=0

Code:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pzl2hrr8n1ntk ... e.zip?dl=0

After converting the Effulgence one to Kindle (using the previewer, so it's probably similar if you do it on Calibre), it seems to work, according to the previewer, on both Kindle Voyager and Kindle DX (the e-ink versions), Fire HD, Fire HDX, and Fire HDX 8.9" (Kindle Fires), but I couldn't get it to generate a good AZW file for Kindle for iOS (using the previewer - Calibre will probably work if you use that). So hopefully it's pretty cross-device. Symbellas are still missing if your font doesn't support them, seeing as I haven't embedded one.

Oh, and they have covers this time, generated by Calibre. I haven't collapsed single-post branches, though.

I feel like I'm just making miniscule, semi-useless changes now. Oh well!

I definitely like some parts of your ToC code, although it currently doesn’t handle sub-threads well. I’m also glad that you tested yours on Kindle, because I haven’t booted into Windows to run the previewer.

Was the reason you made your own that you couldn’t get mine to work, that you didn’t like the results, or something else? Often creating two versions of something leads to both versions being worse than if the same effort had gone into one product. For example, I really like the headers of mine being different based on moiety, but as I said yours has the better ToC handling (especially for Incandescence).

What you call “miniscule semi-useless changes” really add up. The reason I haven’t even tried the sandboxes yet is I know that there will be a lot of small problems and I’ve spent what development effort I put into this getting Effulgence to work better, with the eventual goal of getting it automatically running somewhere so updates don’t need to wait for me to get around to recompiling.

In any case, I have created my own updated Effulgence files and have uploaded them to the same place.

EDIT: Tense of the verb “upload” in the last sentence

“miniscule semi-useless changes” are the mild-mannered alter-ego of polish

DanielH wrote:I definitely like some parts of your ToC code, although it currently doesn’t handle sub-threads well. I’m also glad that you tested yours on Kindle, because I haven’t booted into Windows to run the previewer.

Was the reason you made your own that you couldn’t get mine to work, that you didn’t like the results, or something else? Often creating two versions of something leads to both versions being worse than if the same effort had gone into one product. For example, I really like the headers of mine being different based on moiety, but as I said yours has the better ToC handling (especially for Incandescence).

What you call “miniscule semi-useless changes” really add up. The reason I haven’t even tried the sandboxes yet is I know that there will be a lot of small problems and I’ve spent what development effort I put into this getting Effulgence to work better, with the eventual goal of getting it automatically running somewhere so updates don’t need to wait for me to get around to recompiling.

In any case, I have created my own updated Effulgence files and have uploaded them to the same place.

EDIT: Tense of the verb “upload” in the last sentence

Sub-threads like what? "Who will be coming" having the links under it, pointing to the different threads? Or the branches that are halfway through a thread? (It should work for that, but I'm sure there could be changes I could add.)

When you say the ToC handling, do you mean grabbing it from the index post? That's hard-coded for Incandescence, and then there's a different hard-code for Effulgence, since they have different structures in the HTML (and Incandescence gets processed one way on a web browser and another with BeautifulSoup, meaning it's annoying to select them properly, but I did a weird CSS selector that does it, somehow).

I'm not really sure what moiety is, but I didn't colour the headers because, for me, that's kinda unnecessary (I usually use dark mode on iBooks, which strips background colours like that). I did notice the colours in yours a few times, but I don't know how they actually correspond (is it a single colour for each picture or something?).

I managed to get yours to work, but I thought I'd try to adapt it for Incandescence - unfortunately I wasn't familiar with most of your libraries, and I didn't know how a lot of features worked. After making my own, I actually understand (mostly) how the ebook library works, and a few other bits, so I could probably (if I wanted to) go back and adapt that one now, but at the time I was getting really confused by the code. I'm not really too used to looking at other people's code to understand it.

I'm not sure if you've got this part in your code, but I made it so it now saves the last page number for each chapter, so when it re-downloads the pages, it downloads the first page (so it can get how many pages there are), and if the number of pages is the same as the previous number of pages, it downloads the last page, checks if it's the same as the already-downloaded one, and if it is, doesn't download the rest of it. I'm pretty sure that flat pages show it chronologically, so it should mean that even if stuff is later added to branches, that will appear at the end and get the whole chapter redownloaded. If an edit is made to the end of a branch that wasn't the most recent post, however, it might not notice that there's been a change, but I wouldn't expect that to be a major edit if it did occur, and you can always force it to redownload by deleting the "flatPageMeta" file in web_cache.

Ezra wrote:“miniscule semi-useless changes” are the mild-mannered alter-ego of polish

That's true, I suppose. :P