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Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
MoonEyes
Member since Jun-29-03
1126 posts |
May-03-10, 03:37 PM (EDT) |
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25. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #0
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Something that only just today struck me, vis-a-vis Road Film, is the part where May and Clarkson is discussing the Griffon, where May quite successfully boggles Jezza about the one singular fault that had come over the machine. There, he notes that one of Griffon's own crew found it on a lot in Eleanor City, and bought it for 4800 creds. That crew member is Jamie Finney, and we see the arrival of the car at the H/V Surprise, in Manhunter part 4. Thus, we see the other end of it, as it were, something that amused me to no end. ...! Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths "Nobody Want Verdigris- Covered Balls!" |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
22423 posts |
Apr-14-10, 05:49 PM (EDT) |
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2. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #1
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LAST EDITED ON Apr-14-10 AT 05:51 PM (EDT) >I absolutely loved the piece, and was double-enthralled by the use of >HTML. Will soft wrapping continue into future productions?Apart from Forum retreads like this and the Mini-Omnibus files, no. It's a big pain in the ass doing the conversion, particularly for anything that wasn't originally devised as a Forum post (I cheat by grabbing the reprocessed source of a displayed Forum page and prettying it up some, and that's still a hassle), and I'm for damn sure not going to bother with <p></p> tags as part of the creative stream. Plus, I hate the way HTML displays paragraph formatting. It worked for Correspondence and Road Film because the former is a series of emails and the latter is in script format anyway, but for a long plaintext document like, oh, say Star-Crossed? No first-line tab indent and an extraneous line of whitespace after each graf? Forget about it. Ugly. Hard to read. When was the last time you saw an actual prose book formatted like that? As to ePub, which I assume is a reader format for some portable device or other, I addressed this a few years ago, and though the underlying technologies have changed (who uses a Palm Pilot any more?), my basic take on the problem hasn't: If your equipment can't display a lousy plaintext document 72 columns wide, you need a better toy. :) --G. -><- Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/ Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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bmfrosty
Charter Member
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Apr-14-10, 06:14 PM (EDT) |
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3. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #2
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I absolutely agreed with your assessment back then, and I mostly agree with it now as I rather bemoan the slow loss of the 80 column standard over the years as it's fallen to a bevy of incompatible standards for displaying variable width fonts with the only saving grace being the near universality of HTML - even though it tends to render differently in just about every implementation. ePub, interestingly enough, seems to be a rather competent attempt at a standardized ebook format, and is currently supported (in DRM and non-DRM varieties) by every ebook device on the market except for the Kindle - which Amazon wants all to themselves. Even some non-ePub devices have been upgraded to work with it via firmware updates. Maybe one of these days I'll have to put on my 80 column evangelist shoes and see if I can talk the openinkpot fellows into supporting it in a simple and straightforward manner, but for the moment, it's just not there. |
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Sofaspud
Member since Apr-7-06
433 posts |
Apr-14-10, 06:33 PM (EDT) |
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4. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #3
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I'm torn. While I agree that -anything- capable of displaying text should, in fact, be able to handle plain text at 80 columns, the reality of the situation is that not everything does, and in fact -most- portable reading devices aside from full computers do not. Which is a crying shame, it really is. But since I -do- want to take reading material with me, I tend to just convert it however I need to so I can have it with me. I'm not saying Gryph should do so, nor should he change the writing style to make it easier or anything. Don't get me wrong. But my enthusiastic support of old-school techniques is sometimes overruled by convenience. :) That said, Google can reveal several nifty tools for automatically converting plaintext to HTML. On average, it takes me perhaps a minute to slam any given EPU piece through a converter, and generally I just read it in HTML, since for some scatterbrained reason my smartphone supports that natively, but not plain text-at-80-columns. Going to ePub isn't a problem, though -- I tend to use MobiPocket when I'm doing that, and it'll produce an ebook in just a few seconds. --sofaspud -- |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
22423 posts |
Apr-14-10, 07:27 PM (EDT) |
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6. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #4
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>On average, it takes me perhaps a >minute to slam any given EPU piece through a converter, and generally >I just read it in HTML, since for some scatterbrained reason my >smartphone supports that natively, but not plain text-at-80-columns. Wow. That must make the parts that depend on 80-column-wide fixed-pitchness (like, say, ending credits since about 2000) look like ass. --G. -><- Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/ Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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bmfrosty
Charter Member
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Apr-14-10, 07:58 PM (EDT) |
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8. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #6
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That sir, is a minor inconvenience. In my experience, conversions tend to fall in one of two directions: A) The converter doesn't even try to intelligently merge paragraphs into a single line to be wrapped up on display and you either end up with a horribly narrow display or with single words from the end of lines orphaned onto their own line. B) It tries and fails. The end result that every paragraph not broken up by a section header gets merged into one horrific blob. Either way the centered/split headers and footers you create get mangled. P.S. We seem to be playing the same video games. I just noticed the Borderlands stuff in star-crossed. |
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Sofaspud
Member since Apr-7-06
433 posts |
Apr-14-10, 08:40 PM (EDT) |
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9. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #8
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Gryphon: Yes, the credits get pretty munged -- as do all of the trickier ASCII-art-like bits you did in the Core stories. The one that sticks out most in my mind is the huge NOTHING HAPPENED! (the Wedge windows rattled)Fortunately, sir, you have the lovely habit of using tabs to open your paragraphs. Well, eight spaces, at any rate. bmfrosty: I use TextPad, which does not come with a built-in converter, but -does- support find-and-replace. Because Gryph keeps everything so tidy, I can typically rely on a newline followed by 8 spaces being the start of a new paragraph. Therefore, I just search-and-replace on that with the following replacement text: </p>\n<p> This is not particularly elegant, but because of the way HTML is rendered in every browser I use (ie, it ignores extraneous newlines) I don't have to try and un-wrap the text; I just need to put <p> tags in the appropriate places. This kills the center-formatting -- though if I cared about that I could put in a test for, say, 16 spaces and replace that with a <p align="center"> or whatever. And it trashes the text tables in the credits, though again, if I was concerned about that I'd look at using a table-to-html converter macro that TextPad supports (on their website). All in all, though, it comes out surprisingly well as plain ol' HTML, which I can then read in my browser or pipe into whatever if I feel the need to convert it to an ebook. TextPad isn't the only option; Notepad++ can do the same trick, as can any (I imagine) reasonably powerful text editor. --sofaspud -- |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
22423 posts |
Apr-14-10, 10:14 PM (EDT) |
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13. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #11
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>Also, the lack of indention and non-lack of paragraph spacing can be >overcome with simple css. Ah, I was wondering how long it would take someone to bust out the "just learn CSS" chestnut. Short version: no. Too much faff. --G. -><- Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/ Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
22423 posts |
Apr-15-10, 00:59 AM (EDT) |
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18. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #16
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>EMACS? Does that make editing a bit hard? Every time you change or >edit a line you have to re-edit the line breaks for the rest of the >paragraph as well.M-x fill-paragraph job done. --G. -><- Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/ Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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Sofaspud
Member since Apr-7-06
433 posts |
Apr-15-10, 01:00 AM (EDT) |
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19. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #16
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LAST EDITED ON Apr-15-10 AT 01:01 AM (EDT) It's been a while since I've used EMACS, but I seem to recall it will handle line breaks fairly gracefully with a simple meta command. M-q?Gah. EMACS is one of those things that I liken unto a tac-nuke: it has its place, but for most things? It's overkill. :D Edit: heh. Gryph beat me to it. --sofaspud -- |
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JFerio
Charter Member
194 posts |
Apr-15-10, 08:40 PM (EDT) |
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21. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #13
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>>Also, the lack of indention and non-lack of paragraph spacing can be >>overcome with simple css. > >Ah, I was wondering how long it would take someone to bust out the >"just learn CSS" chestnut. > >Short version: no. Too much faff. > >--G. >-><- >Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin >Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/ >Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. I learned some CSS for a website I administer. It's a *bitch* to set up on a website the first time, but I set it up to minimize the associated faff of updates (I do my HTML in a text editor). With that said, I can understand, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And I do lament that my PDA makes hash without browns when I try to load EPU stuff on it. But then, I've determined that I don't really like reading stories on it. It's tolerable, but nothing replaces good old-fashioned paper, or failing that, a proper damned plain text editor.
Jeffrey 'JFerio' Crouch 'It'll be all right... I think.' - Nene Romanova
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Sofaspud
Member since Apr-7-06
433 posts |
Apr-15-10, 00:45 AM (EDT) |
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17. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #11
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>I'm sure you'll find this fascinating but a long time ago I made up >several icon scripts (google the icon programming lang. for more >information.) to take a single specific story and html it. (In other >words, one script per story) Unfortunately, I lost all of my work in a >hard drive vacation a while back & never really re-thought about it >until tonight. One script per story seems... rather inefficient. No offense. The method I use produces decent results on all of the EPU stuff -- mostly, admittedly, because Gryph -- or his text editor -- is as meticulous as it is about the formatting. If I wanted to spend the time I'm sure a few clever regex's could handle whatever's missing, but regex construction is, in my opinion, something that one does when more enjoyable alternatives, like stabbing yourself in the face with a fork, are unavailable. That said, I'll happily accept output in whatever format I can get it in. If I need it in another format, I'm fine with converting it myself. :D --sofaspud -- |
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acarr
Charter Member
54 posts |
Apr-15-10, 09:39 AM (EDT) |
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20. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #17
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>One script per story seems... rather inefficient. No offense. The >method I use produces decent results on all of the EPU stuff -- >mostly, admittedly, because Gryph -- or his text editor -- is as >meticulous as it is about the formatting. You've never worked with Icon then, have you :) Like I said, this was a while ago.... before Utena came along, at the least. *puts on CS hat for 30 seconds* I agree with the single script per story being excessive but I'm racking my brain for a better solution that would produce good results. Perhaps a script that reads a per-story file for modifications? Regex'ing can only take you so far because each story is different. I think the music tags slowly have changed over the years (don't quote me on that) as well as some stories have 'in the next episode...' after the credits and some have footnotes. So... for 95% of the story could be handled with a common script, it's the outliers that require custom work. The reasoning behind having scripts, otoh, is so that other people could take it, download their own copy of a story, run the script against it, and be happy. (That would help separate the 3rd-party and Ben's 'not with a 10-foot pole' aspect of things...) Unfortunately, I could still see some idiot emailing Ben rants about not updating the scripts right away, too. *sigh* Anyway, I think this will be my final update on this thread about this topic. -- Andrew PM me if you feel like continuing this discussion. |
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A Vile Gangster
Member since Feb-15-10
342 posts |
Apr-14-10, 07:45 PM (EDT) |
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7. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #0
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>(AIM ID REDACTED) Brief horrible mental collision there. >(AIM ID REDACTED) James May driving a car from Bubblegum Crisis. >(AIM ID REDACTED) "At this point, we discovered an important fact >about this car. It had TASTE." >(AIM ID REDACTED) Clarkson: "THE AI IS TRYING TO KILL ME!" > >...which amused me far too much to fail to share. I meant to reply to this last night. Very, very funny. It seems strangely appropriate that Clarkson gets eaten by the Griffon Mk.1. I bet you he fiddled with something. It seems like everything is funnier, in fact, when run through the Top Gear filter. How do they do that? ---- Now Playing: Pendulum -- Blood Sugar(Dub Plate, 2007) Ladies and Gentlemen, we understand that you have come tonight to bear witness to the sound of drum...and...bass. We regret to announce that this is not the case, as instead, we come tonight to bring you "The Sonic Recreation of the End of the World". Ladies and Gentlemen, prepare to HOLD YOUR COLOUR. Okay, fuck it, I lied. It's drum and bass. What'ya gonna do? < THIS SPACE FOR RENT > |
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Astynax
Charter Member
1061 posts |
Apr-14-10, 09:15 PM (EDT) |
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10. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #7
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>It seems like everything is funnier, in fact, when run through the Top >Gear filter. How do they do that? The V8 blender?
| | -={(Astynax)}=- "You can't blend old people!" |
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A Vile Gangster
Member since Feb-15-10
342 posts |
Apr-14-10, 09:53 PM (EDT) |
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12. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #10
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YES. Also the Rocket Robin and the Unkillable Toyota Hilux. ---- Now Playing: Fatboy Slim -- Ya Mama(Halfway Between The Gutter And The Stars, 2000) Shake what ya mama gave yaaaaaaaa! < THIS SPACE FOR RENT > |
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MoonEyes
Member since Jun-29-03
1126 posts |
May-03-10, 03:37 PM (EDT) |
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25. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #0
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Something that only just today struck me, vis-a-vis Road Film, is the part where May and Clarkson is discussing the Griffon, where May quite successfully boggles Jezza about the one singular fault that had come over the machine. There, he notes that one of Griffon's own crew found it on a lot in Eleanor City, and bought it for 4800 creds. That crew member is Jamie Finney, and we see the arrival of the car at the H/V Surprise, in Manhunter part 4. Thus, we see the other end of it, as it were, something that amused me to no end. ...! Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths "Nobody Want Verdigris- Covered Balls!" |
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Star Ranger4
Charter Member
2483 posts |
May-04-10, 03:19 PM (EDT) |
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27. "RE: Road Film With Fighting Repost"
In response to message #25
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>That crew member is Jamie Finney, and we see the arrival of the car at >the H/V Surprise, in Manhunter part 4. Thus, we see the other end of >it, as it were, something that amused me to no end. Heh. About the only thing there is that with the cronological order of release G didnt realise when he wrote Manhunt that the front tire was only going to be down 6 psi. Certainly does fall under the category of "Nothing Henry and I cant fix" -- the exact quote from Manhunt -- but that line also implied to myself, personally, that there might have been an assumption of there being something more wrong with the Gryph than just one low tyre. Then again, this is digging too deeply. So, for the No Prize prize; let us all just assume that Jamie thought there might be more wrong with the Gryph than just one low tyre only to be proved wrong once she and Lang took a look under the hood. ;) Of COURSE you wernt expecting it! No One expects the FANNISH INQUISITION! RCW# 86 |
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version 3.3 © 2001
Eyrie Productions,
Unlimited
Benjamin
D. Hutchins
E P U (Colour)
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