Show HN: Personalize Romeo and Juliet or Pride and Prejudice | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Personalize Romeo and Juliet or Pride and Prejudice

textusclassics.com

56 pointsrhythmvs36 comments

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I think I've spotted a flaw in this cunning plan:

"For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Sam."

Doesn't really work.

Wait, clearly I've chosen the wrong name. I can fix this!

"For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Frododo."

Perfect!

You're on the right track. Other options:

Leonardo. Giancarlo. Fernando. Emilio. Alonzo. Ezio. Jethro. Galileo. DeNiro. Neo.

Well, almost. To properly fit in the meter it would have to be three syllables with stress on the first syllable (and last, but that will mostly take care of itself). So Ezio works, but none of the others fit when spoken 'naturally'. Jethro could if you say "Jeth(er)o". Alonzo would if you say it like "Elon-zo".

I guess we should take a better look at something like http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Poem/ or http://rhymeless.hamiltonulmer.com and implement some rhyming name generator to add to our app :-)

Just kidding, of course. But that’s why I love HN so much: you show ’em something and they start brainstorming on a side track of intellectual creativity. Thank you so much, guys, for all the hearty feedback on our app!

Eh, I guess I'm more tolerant of not making it syllable-count perfect. I mentally tested them and all of those sounded fine to me, with some minor bastardization of the pronunciation (instead of Jethero, for example, I put a tiny pause half-beat in it).

Speak for yourself

"For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Joe."

So basically is an adult, public-domain version of those books you can get for children, where they insert their name in the story. e.g. http://www.simplypersonalized.com/product/personalized-spide...

Accents and other symbols cannot be printed

I wonder what sort of systems they're using. Even ISO-8859-1/Windows-1252 has accented characters.

If you do not enter the friend's names, they will appear in the Personalized SpiderMan Book as 'none'.

That immediately reminds me of https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/

Hopefully the OP's service will be more robust than this.

Hi, OP here! Multilingual support is core and center of our development. We do a lot more than accents, and go great lengths to make all of our stack, Unicode-based. That means ES6 regexes, up to designing and developing our own fonts. If that interests you, then have a look at http://dodecaglotta.com, too, a side project of mine, where I use that font and show how mad we are with language support…

Just made my order, thank you for this! On my way to scoring +10000 relationship points!

There where some errors in the name form. Names that where changed, couldn't be changed again (I'm using Firefox) & In the last form of Pride & Prejudice, The change I made on the last name weren't reflected in the text.

All & all, super & clever idea!

Thanks a lot! We’re working on the input issue you mention.

My name is James and your site does not seem to respect the ends with s possessive rule. (James'). Thoughts on a fix?

That's because the "ends with s" possessive rule only applies for plurals. The correct possessive of James is "James's"

You mean you expected “James’ faithful wife” but got “James’s faithful wife” instead?

We could implement it your way, but since – as far as I know – grammar rules* diverge (allowing both orthographies), we opted for the uniform application of the possessive /’s/, which was easier to implement, too. What do you think: should we vary between books, based on the idiom of the original text, or should it be a user preference?

(*) http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/apostro.asp

Well if you ask me personally, it should be "James's" and anyone who disagrees fails English class in school. Of course, I don't make the rules; in fact no one person does and that's the problem here. I doubt there is a big enough number of people who care to customise such a fine detail, so for your product I would just use the rules obeyed in the original text. Or if you don't want to customise on a per-text basis, the rule used by the majority of texts. Or just the easier one, since it's technically correct.

Thanks for the feedback! I agree with you. So, we’ll stick to the orthography of the original text (which in these two cases, Shakespeare and Austen, already were obeying to the majority rule of `’s` instead of `’`).

In our generic product, though, users will be able to select and apply their preferences for orthotypography, i.e. such things like single or double quotes (Oxford vs Chicago, British vs American). But when it comes to spelling per se, we will leave it up to the user to go with the ‘correct’ form of English of their liking, and leave the input text untouched.

Jim's.

I guess if you ignore the whole publishing thing, which to me is the interesting part :P

Definitely! This is but a sneak preview for our upcoming product, which powers this whole search/replace/print spin-off: a typographic intelligence engine, which analyzes arbitrary text input, and then designs, templates and typesets into top-grade publications, everything automated, including cover design. That way, book publishing may indeed become as easy as drag-and-drop.

See for yourself: the input we used for pride-and-prejudice.textusclassics.com is on Github: https://github.com/textvs/Pride-and-Prejudice_1342 — It took our engine ~50 seconds to go from plain text to pdf.

> Imagine you and your sweetheart starring in the greatest love stories of all time: personalize Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

It's not a great love story, it's a cautionary tale of how reckless teenagers who are too quick to jump to conclusions.

That’s why we also have Pride and Prejudice on offer ;-) And soon enough, you’ll be able to write your very own greatest love story, and have it typeset and published with our typographic design engine. As You Like It :-p

This looks stunning.

Not that it really matters, but without sanitation of the name input fields I was able to put in some html to really make the rendered text quite wonky.

Stunning project!

Happy to hear you love our work! You’re right: we don’t html-sanitize user input in the form, so one can indeed do some colorful hacks and put in some easter eggs.

    <i style='color:pink;font-family: cursive;'>Darcy</i>

Though I don’t expect people to purchase such a funky copy, one can have some fun allright. But thanks for noticing anyway!

This is a great idea, absolutely love it! It's a great gift for couples who like to read thought I would not just personalize any classic and read it that way. As an avid reader, this is something that I really want in my collection of books.

I'm sure I'll make my wife happy with this personalized Romeo and Julliet as well. Though I think I might be more excited for it than her :D

I take it the spiel on that page wasn't written by a native speaker? The flow seems very strange. Don't get me wrong, it's excellent English on the whole, just a bit weird.

In part it reads like the page was written to sell a publishing platform and then modified to sell search-and-replaced names in books.

Personally I can't see a market for it at all; yet there seems to be several gushing positive comments here (maybe a bit too positive, it looks suspicious, but perhaps I'm just not the target).

Has anyone really ever thought "oh I wish my name was in P&P instead of Mr Darcy"?

Mind you I find the children's version of this saccharin too; bowdlerising a classic just seems to make it even worse.

The typography of the web page looks all wonky on FF/Windows, with the text being blurry and wavy...

Puts me off going further.

We have tested cross-browser behavior on most common platform combo’s. Which version of Windows + Firefox are you on? Care to tell what you see more specifically? I know there’s still an unresolved issue with the <picture> element on browsers which don’t support it natively, but the typography (the typeset text that is) should be all fine, is it not?

Here's a screenshot : https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2P8VW0o_NjORlNMczdCUEpnQn...

That's FF51/Windows 7 32 bits (thrashy corporate laptop)

Thanks! That’s helpful, indeed. Though, judging from the screenshot, it’s an issue with our fonts, which have not been optimally hinted (yet), because, in the days of retina displays, hinting only still matters for… trashy corporate laptops with OS’s that don’t properly support subpixel anti-aliasing and which rely on a font’s built-in rasterizing ‘hints’.

So, thanks again for letting us know, so we put more careful font hinting higher up on our todo. Meanwhile, I hope you’d want to give TextusClassics.com a second chance, using another machine.

Wow, I would love to read a classic with a twist. Whimsical, and most of all, it looks gorgeous. Great gift!

That's absolutely lovely! And the site works really well on mobile. Kudos!

Am I the only one here who finds this to be a ridiculous idea? The joy of reading doesn't exactly come from seeing your own name replacing Jane Eyre's.

The idea is to illustrate the power of iterative typesetting in combination with Printing on Demand. I can understand you don't like the idea of seeing yourself show up in every story, but you must like the idea that any manuscript out there, can be automatically designed and typeset and even iteratively be redacted or translated and forked into new editions...

THAT is, in fact, very interesting. I'm not sure why you lead with the personalization factor on HN.

Yeah I'm not very interested in the idea but the tech that is drivng it is super fascinating. Somewhere else in this thread the (owner?) mentioned this was a step on the road towards automated drag and drop publishing which would be AMAZING if they get it right.

As a passionate writer that knows he's not good the current gauntlet to self publishing turned me away despite the fact that I would willing pay $500 in a heartbeat to have a copy of one of my stories on my bookshelf.

That’s exactly what we are building. And self-publishing authors are at the center of our focus.

I hope we will indeed ‘get it right’. I can tell you, it’s not something so trivial as ‘put a fancy GUI on top of LaTeX’. Instead, we are developing a complete typographic design engine, which involves natural language processing, file normalizations, drama parsing, complicated algorithms for type fitting, sectioning, page count quiring, color space conversions, Unicode common locale, multilingual hyphenation, opentype feature development, etc., etc.

12 meters of typographic literature are backing us, while we spend countless late nights in front of our code editor. My printing experience with my Original Heidelberg letterpresses in my garage puts some extra weight on the scale — I just love letters and books, the whole lot of typographic history!

It might assure you, if I tell you I am also methodically working my way through the Chicago Manual of Style, turning those prescriptive rules into working software.

So, do subscribe to our waiting list, and expect your invite coming soon: http://textus.io!

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