Someone suggested I whack out a Kindle version of an amusing, informative and mildly obscene 16th century educational text which is isn’t available in usable form anywhere else, and I was just wondering how one would structure the information on a 600*800 screen. Here’s one classification:
A B C D E F Speaker name C16th French C16th English C16th author sidenote C21st equivalent for difficult word in C16th Eng/Spa C21st footnote
One concept that works in theory is to leave the original (classes A-D) more or less intact and do my class E with rollovers and class F with footnotes thusly:
Speaker name C16th French1 C16th English C16th author sidenote
1. C21st footnote
Unfortunately hovers on Kindle and similar devices appear to be a pain in the arse, and I’m not sure how well that kind of structuring would survive transfer via Calibre or whatever. Over to you, experts.
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Here are a couple of serendipities from along the way. First, my class E hung on line-ends in an edition of Caxton’s Dialogues:
Second, three-column layout of English, French and a French phonetic version of the English from Bellot’s Familiar dialogues:
Finally, parallel footnoting in a bilingual edition of Juan Francisco Manzano, Autobiografia de un Esclavo:
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Whatever . . . .
I take it that wasn’t an advance order.
Put all your crap in footnotes and wait for something better to come along.
Bit of a dumb question, really, wasn’t it?
And all that effort?
Oh this is soooo cute!
But I also get the message: there’s no fish left (behind).
None of that’s going to work for the simple reason that Kindle doesn’t do anything but tiny, simple tables. Here’s the doc: http://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf
Back to the drawing board. Possible solution: cut it down to one column by
* concatenating the speaker, the Spanish and the English with suitable dividers
* removing the author’s footnotes from their column and including them with yours.
A bit messy, but might work. I don’t think reading 3.5 column on 600px would be much fun anyway.
I’m surprised I haven’t been assassinated already for suggesting using tables.
But thanks!