formatting French ebooks

You might think that formatting French ebooks in Curl as web markup would be easy – and it is – but there are still challenges.

If you use the TocDocument as the default document-style there are markup hierarchy issues under each {heading level=n, } macro.

I usually start with simply a default vanilla {paragraph } macro and then move to user defined formats and procedures.

The challenge is to make this accessible to the non-programmer working in a non-Western language.

At this time I am evaluating two rebol language variants (r3 and red) and one Icon variant (Object Icon) for parsing my Curl markup in accordance NOT with Curl syntax but USER preferences.

If all else fails, I will fall back to Logtalk with some Prolog dialect.

In the case of my current French ebook, the rules are to cover non-breaking spaces. The rule of thumb in France is to surround "two-part" punctuation with spaces. The challenge is to address resizeable text frames or panes in which re-flowed text must remain readable.

The minor rules apply to ALL Curl ebooks where the text is in Curl markup (and until we have a webkit wrapper library, that is what I use) such as converting all ASCII single quotes, quotes, psuedo-hypens, brackets and installing matching left- and right- quotation devices.

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Kindle PC Reader

I am running the Kindle PC Reader 1.8.3 and it is dreadful.  Hopeless footnote formatting.

My post on this at Global Curl is somewhat polemical and rhetorical, but really - given the lack of features in the iBook 2 Author tool, both Apple and Amazon are inviting competition.

Kobo's new owners?  I'm thinking of the disregard for Toyota back when they were a minor vendor in North America - only now we are talking China, Indonesia, India and many other cultural regions where Amazon, Apple and Google just don't cut it.  And I don't mean "pages".

For an interesting language with a natural bent for such things as flowing footnotes, see co-expressions in Icon, Unicon, Converge or Object Icon (or constraint-handling rule libraries elsewhere post-PROLOGIA IV and CLP.)

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netstring markdown md2curl

1)  add a Curl class for parsing netstring such as

14:4:this,1: ,9:netstring,,

with docs note on handling true length of utf-8 strings in light-weight markup.  A PEG parser ?

2)  md2curl is available as name for markdown-to-Curl parser.  See Java PEG parser.  Q: what advantages to having Traits for parsers ?

note: true-length of presented string varies also with Unicode composing marks such as accents for presenting Russian as text in e-learning applications.  Given these issues, a parser in Icon, UNICON or Object Icon seems appealing as an alternative to PROLOG. alternative: compiled Red (Rebol-like).

ironic, in a way, that we move to 64-bit while shy of UTF-16 as we get terabyte DASD and higher-speed networks: 16-bit text could have been planned as the markdown delight (we might even have been spared XML.)

I have a link to this post over at the global Curl community.

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