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Comment by nitemice | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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…

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.

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.

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.

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