[OLPC library] Preferred font size for ebooks on the XO?

[Diane Serley]

This works well for a tech document or a picturebook, but not so well for a
novel.  If its HTML there is no pagination... you can only break by
chapters. But there are no other markers that let you, for example, stop at
page 127 and pick it up again there tomorrow. Instead, you have to stop in
Chapter 8 and then tomorrow search through Chapter 8 to get to the place you
stopped at -- do-able, but vaguely inconvenient.

Here's an example: I just formatted the novel Jane Eyre. Formatting for the
XO the book ends up being 443 pages long or 38 chapters. I personally
wouldn't want to read that as 38 HTML pages. They would be waaaay to long
and finding where I might have stopped previously would be a pain. And I
especially wouldn't want to have 443 HTML pages!

I guess I'm hung up on the "book" portion of "e-book" and expecting e-books
to behave like books with pagination. Am I just being old-fashioned?

Diane


On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 2:49 PM, Seth Woodworth <seth at laptop.org> wrote:

> If the material currently exists in a PDF that's fine.  But if at all
> possible an ebook should be in html, and a pdf should be converted into
> html.
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 8:52 AM, Diane Serley <olpc.aunti.mame at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> This works if the page is HTML, but not if its a PDF, etc. Or should all
>> e-books should be HTML/XML? There's nothing that explains what
>> standards/type/format to use to create e-book collections.
>>
>> Diane
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 1:41 AM, Seth Woodworth <seth at laptop.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Fonts should be unformatted and in HTML, that way they are:
>>>
>>> a) Reusuable
>>> b) Extensible and the formatting can be viewed via View-source
>>> c) Fonts can be set by the user ala about:config
>>> d) Reflowed on screen rotation
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 7:38 PM, Mel Chua <mel at melchua.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>  Diane asked a great question today that I didn't know the answer to:
>>>>
>>>> Is there a preferred/recommended font size (or for that matter, font and
>>>> formatting) for ebooks being packaged for the XO? She's converting some
>>>> public domain stuff for the library, and wants to have the optimal
>>>> reading ratio if possible.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks!
>>>>
>>>> -a curious mel
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