Hacker News Reader

Comment by kwhitefoot | Hacker News Reader

Hmm. I've just downloaded Algis Budrys' "Short Fiction" and Lewis Carroll's "Alice", I have to say I have mixed feelings about the files. Both render very badly in Calibre (on Debian Linux, latest stable), very uncomfortable to read with lots of unexpected spaces breaking up the words, yet they render perfectly in Ionic on my Nokia N9 and in FBReader on my Lenovo Android tablet. I've never seen this happen before so I'm not sure if this is a bug in Calibre or in the epub file.

A couple of questions:

- How come there is no search function?

- Why are authors sorted by first name?

- Do the results of the proof reading get fed back to Project Gutenberg, et al.

- Will readers like FBReader be able to add this catalogue?

So, sounds like a good idea and I hope it succeeds but it's not quite there yet.

View on HN

Have you tried downloading the compatible epub2 file, instead of the epub3 file? I don't think I've used Calibre to test our ebooks on, generally we test on eink devices and tablet reading software, all of which works more or less fine. Unfortunately the state of ereading software today looks a lot like the terrible IE6/Netscape days of yore, where there are no standards and everyone does their own thing differently. It's difficult/impossible to make one file that will render well across all devices.

There is no search function because our catalog is so small. It's growing though, so maybe it's about time to add a search function too. Sort by first name is an oversight that I hope to be able to fix later this week.

Our edits don't go back to Project Gutenberg, because our final files are so different from what PG produces merging would be impossible. We also introduce typographical and spelling changes that they might not want to accept.

Yes, FBReader and other readers that use OPDS can add our catalog: https://standardebooks.org/opds/

Edit: Just tried reading the Alice compatible epub file using Calibre 2.55 on Ubuntu 16.04 and it seems to render fine. Maybe you can send a note to our mailing list and we can discuss this in more detail so I can get things fixed?

Both files were epub2 not epub3.

Perhaps my I have a different calibre version, I'll check again. I opened the Budrys file in Calibre's editor and what I saw that a lot of perfectly correctly spelt words were highlighted as being misspelt. I copied some text from there to Emacs and then saw that there was a hyphen (actually I'm not sure exactly what character it is but it looks like a hyphen) at the point where the reader renders a space.

> FBReader and other readers that use OPDS can add our catalog: https://standardebooks.org/opds/

Your site looks very pretty but I feel that it is hard to discover things. Sometimes fewer or smaller graphics can make it easier to find one's way around.

Anyway, I do understand that it is tough to find time to make everything perfect (I'm a software developer and my to do list never gets shorter).

Thanks for finding time to reply.

I'm not involved in this project but I'll bet you're seeing these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_hyphen

It seems that it is specifically Calibre 2.5 that renders incorrectly. Just in case this bug bites anyone else here is what I posted in the Standard Ebooks mailing list:

"acabal was kind enough to respond to a comment that I made on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570035) and to ask me to bring the discussion here.

The problem that I mentioned was that the two epub2 files that I downloaded didn't render properly in Calibre on Debian even though they rendered properly in Ionic on Nokia N9 and FBReader on Android. It seems that the file has soft hyphens (thanks gwillen) that Calibre was rendering as tabs (or something similar).

In my comment I said that I wasn't sure whether the problem was the files or Calibre.

I have now tried another Calibre installation. This time on Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa and it works perfectly.

It seems that the version delivered by Debian doesn't render correctly. Unfortunately the version that renders wrongly is Calibre 2.5.0 on Debian whereas the one that works is Calibre 1.25 on Linux Mint. So I am still confused.

Time to download Calibre 3.0.0.

Works perfectly.

So, many thanks to everyone and good luck with the project."

I’ve fed spelling mistakes in Gutenberg text back to them during an SE production. It’s down to the individual editors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com