*nod* The Final Product must be paid for. I'm just squinting my beady little eyes at the different pricing stuff for ebooks that Baen and other publishers are doing, and wondering what Baen's reasons are that... other people's aren't. I'm also noticing a lot of self-publishers are pricing e-stories around the $5 mark ( http://www.closed-circle.net/ , http://www.barbarahambly.com/?page_id=78 ).
I suppose that if bold/italics/etc are included in the definition, then yes, minimal typesetting is indeed necessary. But picking font, font-size, the exact pixel balance for your tab markers, etc.? Those... um, well, they go away as soon as I pick a standard font that I want to see all my ebooks in because I like it. (I developed a deep loathing for HTML email because it often tries to take away the settings I like, and replace them with 6-point Flyspeck. My emailers may be better at asserting their setting-dominance over it now, since I haven't had that problem for a while.)
...I probably also consider that minimal markup to be a "just" because I'm doing this book, see (isn't everyone?), and posting it to an LJ filter for beta-readers and my mom. I have to mark it up. (The master document has both minimal HTML markup -- not even <p></p> since LJ doesn't need it (I insert the double-spacing by hand when posting) -- and traditional WYSIWYG underlining. By this time, I can splat in that stuff about like I breathe. And possibly more consistently than I spell without a spellchecker. Arguably, a word processing app could turn WYSIWYG code into HTML, but I do know that MS Word's HTML conversion is a thing of chthonic horror and instead of finding a better app, I went with the "learn to do the minimal stuff raw" approach. Have to do it for my LJ posts anyway...
By the time I finish editing this sucker down to size, though... I think the minimal code in it will be perfect, though. I've seen it enough gods-forsaken times, and always patch the errors (unclosed bold and italics tags are obvious!) in the master document.
I wonder how much I could make putting minimal HTML into documents, to make them ready for HTML or epub format? And how quickly I could get through a book, doing it. Hmmmmmm...
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-02-06 12:57 am (UTC)I suppose that if bold/italics/etc are included in the definition, then yes, minimal typesetting is indeed necessary. But picking font, font-size, the exact pixel balance for your tab markers, etc.? Those... um, well, they go away as soon as I pick a standard font that I want to see all my ebooks in because I like it. (I developed a deep loathing for HTML email because it often tries to take away the settings I like, and replace them with 6-point Flyspeck. My emailers may be better at asserting their setting-dominance over it now, since I haven't had that problem for a while.)
...I probably also consider that minimal markup to be a "just" because I'm doing this book, see (isn't everyone?), and posting it to an LJ filter for beta-readers and my mom. I have to mark it up. (The master document has both minimal HTML markup -- not even <p></p> since LJ doesn't need it (I insert the double-spacing by hand when posting) -- and traditional WYSIWYG underlining. By this time, I can splat in that stuff about like I breathe. And possibly more consistently than I spell without a spellchecker. Arguably, a word processing app could turn WYSIWYG code into HTML, but I do know that MS Word's HTML conversion is a thing of chthonic horror and instead of finding a better app, I went with the "learn to do the minimal stuff raw" approach. Have to do it for my LJ posts anyway...
By the time I finish editing this sucker down to size, though... I think the minimal code in it will be perfect, though. I've seen it enough gods-forsaken times, and always patch the errors (unclosed bold and italics tags are obvious!) in the master document.
I wonder how much I could make putting minimal HTML into documents, to make them ready for HTML or epub format? And how quickly I could get through a book, doing it. Hmmmmmm...