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<title>The Devil’s Dictionary: Editor’s Foreword</title>
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<h1>Editor’s Foreword</h1>
<p class="firstpara">This Open eBook edition of <i>The Devil’s Dictionary</i> was begun as a way for
me to learn the Open eBook (OEB) structure and how to write clean XHTML that duplicates the original formatting of the
typeset edition.</p>
<p class="indentpara">Having hit the limitations of the OEB format and current OEB readers in this attempt, I am
posting this early version of my conversion effort as a test document that illustrates the shortcomings of the
format and is meant to encourage the developers to address these issues in forthcoming versions of their software
and the OEB specification itself.</p>
<p class="indentpara">The most difficult problem I have faced in formatting <i>The Devil’s Dictionary</i>
has been poetry. The print copy I own has the poems formatted so that the attribution line is right justified
with the end of the longest line of the poem, no stanza is broken across pages, and the whole thing is centered
within the margins of the body text. This is a very natural way to format the poetry, yet it is impossible to
duplicate this structure with the current eBook readers—most notably, with Microsoft Reader.</p>
<p>First, the only
way to create the desired justification and centering with HTML is to place the whole poem inside one table. This
works for small poems, but not for larger ones because MS Reader cuts off all text in a table cell when the end
of the page is reached, preventing long poems from being displayed in their entirity. Additionally, if each stanza
is placed inside a pair of paragraph tags (as would seem natural) many of the indents must be accomplished by
adjusting the left margin of that individual line with a <code><span></code> tag. This should work, since
both this tag and the left margin property are applied to all elements (block and inline) according to the HTML and
CSS specifications. MS Reader, however, ignores this instruction. An example of this formatting
is found in the “A” section of the <i>Dictionary</i>.</p>
<p>An alternate way to format the poems is to enclose each poem in a <code><blockquote></code> tag,
each line in its own paragraph tag (with different CSS classes to handle the needed indents and close up
the line spacing) and, each stanza in a <code><span></code> tag (with the CSS page-break-after property set
to avoid breaking across pages). However, the blockquote’s margins causes many poems towrap, does not
center the poem, places the attribution line (and any right-justified lines of the poem) almost at the right margin
of the book (sometimes far away from the poem itself), and MS Reader ignores the instructions to not
wrap the stanzas. This method is demonstrated in the “B” section of the <i>Dictionary</i>.</p>
<p>As I was writing this, I thought of what should have been an obvious construct for these poems: putting
each stanza in a separate table cell. This solves many, but not all, of the problems described above. For poems
with short- or medium-length stanzas viewed with the PC version of MS Reader on a large-screen laptop
it should work fine. But for a PocketPC, or even for poems with long single stanzas on a PC, the bottom of each long
stanza will still be lost. You can see the results of this experiment in the “C” section of the
<i>Dictionary</i>.</p>
<p>These issues can best be demonstrated by one representative poem in each of the first three sections, when
reading the book in the desktop version of MS Reader. <a href="A.html#abracadabra">Abracadabra</a> should
be separated into stanzas with 1em of space between each, but since Reader ignores the <code><span></code>
tag, it is just one long block. The poem cited under the definition of <a href="B.html#beg">beg</a> exemplifies
the problems with the wide right margin described above. Although not perfect, the poem cited under
<a href="C.html#carmelite">carmelite</a> is presented almost exactly as it should be. The poem is properly
centered, the indents and right justification appear as intended, and the poem is broken across pages only
between stanzas. But when viewed on a smaller screen (almost certainly with a Pocket PC) the first stanza
alone will likely be cut off.</p>
<p>A major additional problem, not specific to this book, is the inability of any current OEB reader to handle
Unicode text, as mandated in the OEB specification. An example of how such a Unicode document appears is
demonstrated in sections “D” (UTF-8) and “E” (UTF-16) of the <i>Dictionary</i>. Notice that
the Unicode signature/byte-order mark which appears at the beginning of each of these files causes problems with
both the readers and with the authoring tools. The MobiPocket Publisher can not complete the conversion
process at all, and while ReaderWorks handles both relatively OK, MS Reader can not display UTF-8 files
correctly (the Unicode signature causes it to ignore all CSS formatting and UTF-8 characters are displayed
as their literal byte sequence, something specifically forbidden by the OEB specification) and the whole
section “E” disappears because of the byte-order mark.</p>
<p>Most sections beyond E have not yet been fully formatted, so please do not expect them to look pretty.</p>
<h2>Project Gutenberg</h2>
<p class="indentpara">Another goal is much broader. I have long known of Project Gutenberg, but have
always found its insistence on plain ASCII to be a handicap that limited its appeal and usability. Don’t
get me wrong—the effort has provided a tremendous resource, and at the time the project was begun
(and until very recently) plain ASCII was clearly the best choice. But you can’t properly format a book
with just ASCII characters. Not only must basic things such as *bold* and _italics_ be indicated in a funky
manner, it is simply impossible to preserve the accented characters, ligatures, and many other important
features. And trying to display such a work legibly on a PDA or eBbook reader with a small screen is
impossible, given the hard line breaks that are present (keeping the text from flowing properly).</p>
<p class="indentpara">With is footing solidly in HTML and XML and its completely open nature, the Open eBook
format is the ideal structure in which to continue the goals of Project Gutenberg on into the 21<sup>st</sup>
century. So this edition of <i>The Devil’s Dictionary</i> is not meant just as a personal learning
project, but as an example of the benefits to offering current and future editions as Open eBooks. I don’t
dispute the benefits of the current plain ASCII versions, but with the right automation tools, future editions
could begin as Open eBooks and then be converted to plain ASCII, making both versions available without
duplicated effort. This would be far preferable to starting with plain ASCII versions and converting them to
Open eBook. This is the method I obviously used for this edition, and I assure you that it is quite tedious
and not well-suited as a standard practice.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">Peter K. Sheerin</p>
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