November Preview
Added 2024-11-22 19:16:35 +0000 UTCGreetings Mythicists! I hope your month is going well, and your NPCs aren't eating all of the cranberry sauce.
For this month's Tier-3 preview, it is both a preview of stuff I'm working on and also me seeking help and advice.
I'm working on making reflowable epub versions of my stuff. It's been something of a hurdle to get over, since there is quite a gulf between how my books are usually typeset and what works for epub formatting. Many thanks to Mythicist rune for encouraging me to do this and helping me refine my workflow.
And that's how we come to today's preview. I have a working test of the first chapter of Mythic Game Master Emulator 2e in reflowable epub format. I would appreciate feedback of your impressions of how it's looking on your devices and any recommendations you have.
I'm trying to hammer out a repeatable workflow I can do for all of my books. Unfortunately, ePubs can look different on different devices, so I figure the best way to test this is to throw it out into the world and ask the Mythicists for your thoughts!
My hope is to get this workflow to a place where I can quickly and easily convert my existing layouts into reflowable epubs and probably include them alongside the PDF downloads on DriveThruRPG.
If you decide to load up this file, please leave your thoughts and comments below.
Thank you, and happy adventuring!
Comments
Tried it out on my MacBook Air. Looks great to me! Didn't see any issues for me personally. I'm probably not the best because i rarely read EPUBs unless I import them into Kindle so that I can access them on any device. I'm one of these rare creatures that actually prefers Android for some things and Apple for other things. However, I didn't see any problems with it for me personally.
Roosevelt Cooper
2024-11-30 19:06:56 +0000 UTCThank you Kevin! I appreciate it. I'm going to rework how the sidebars are presented, I'm not happy with it, so that's a good one to point out. I'm going to see about putting shading behind the text, although I had some problems with that when I experimented. I think I can make that work though.
Tana Pigeon
2024-11-25 17:48:40 +0000 UTCI opened it in Apple Books on my Mac. It looks good. The text lays out pretty nicely and it flows well. Enlarging and shrinking the font works well, the text reformats well. The pictures look great, too. The sidebars don't stand out like they do in the PDF version, but that might be on purpose. I personally like the titles in the PDF, where it's a blue bar with the text on the left. In the epub version the bar is missing and the titles are centered. But that's just personal preference. Overall it's looking good!
Kevin F.
2024-11-25 13:50:16 +0000 UTCSure, Discord would work, or you could email it to me at tana@wordmillgames.com. I appreciate you testing it out! Yes, those sidebars definitely need different formatting.
Tana Pigeon
2024-11-22 21:45:02 +0000 UTCTested on my iPhone with fairly large text. I’d say it’s usable but a bit confusing in places - probably due to those sidebars. It’s got some rough spots, but better than some ePubs I’ve encountered. I noticed the table has not made it over yet though. I took a pile of screenshots illustrating various things, but apparently Patreon doesn’t do images. 😬 Honestly the quickest thing for me to do might be a screen recording of the images and commentary and upload to Discord, assuming it’s small enough to fit.
Jeremy W. Sherman
2024-11-22 21:41:56 +0000 UTCThank you Shawn :) Yes, I don't like the sidebar separators either. I tried shading the background, but I lost my indents when I did that. I may try that again. I agree, the padding is off, especially above images and headlines. I need to polish that. I think it will help if I use em spacing for the padding as opposed to points. Changing indents to em spacing really helped smooth those spaces out in earlier tests.
Tana Pigeon
2024-11-22 20:42:48 +0000 UTCThank you :) That's great feedback, expanding the TOC listings is easy to do.
Tana Pigeon
2024-11-22 20:39:20 +0000 UTCI loaded the epub into Google Play Books, my primary ereading app. Pictures look great, text flows, everything seems fine. I know this is just the preview, but I would hope that when this is finalized that each subheading in a chapter is also linked in the TOC (For instance, "Mythic Adventures" is one of the chapters currently, but I would also want "How does it work?", "Mythic, Your Role-Playing Partner", etc. to also be subheadings in the TOC, too)
Tavon Gatling
2024-11-22 20:36:29 +0000 UTCLooks like it's off to a good start to me. I took a look on my Apple devices, and it was perfectly usable and functional. Later I can load it up into a real dedicated e-book reader (Kobo) if I remember. It seems like no small feat to translate a layout-rich book to ePub, so I don't envy the task. A couple observations or questions: 1. Is there any other way to distinguish the sidebar sections? E.g., "How Does It Work?", "Mythic With a Group". I see you are surrounding them with the little Mythic icon, but without context it's hard to know what the icon means, what it's separating, etc. Does ePub have a sidebar element? Or can the block quote element be repurposed? Don't know if either of those are options, just spitballing. 2. Padding is a bit inconsistent, and in general I think a little more might be needed, particularly above some section headers. And e.g. the dice image needs more padding around it. Some of the this might only stand out when your ebook reader is set to vertically scroll the ebook like a web page instead of being paginated. (Apple Books can be configured this way. I assume others can.) I'm curious how some of the big tables like the Fate Chart will translate!
Shawn LeMaster
2024-11-22 20:33:00 +0000 UTCThe text looks great on my Rakuten Kobo Color. But the images seem cut off.
Dean Windemuller
2024-11-22 19:48:15 +0000 UTC
