Announcement: TW5-powered ebooks

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Xavier Cazin

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Mar 11, 2020, 6:33:57 AM3/11/20
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Hi everyone,

TL;DR: Go to https://www.7switch.com/fr/ebook/9783962558772/great-expectations-serapis-classics, click on "Read an extract" and play with it. Then come back if you'd like to know more.

I have been working in the publishing industry for the past 25 years, including the last 10 years as the co-founder of a French ebook distribution company, immatériel.fr. Among many things that got me frustrated in the course of selling ebooks is the fact that ebook formats have never been in phase with how we have linked ourselves to knowledge in the two last decades.


The main reason for this particular failure is because ePub and Mobipocket were initially (around 2010) imposed to publishers by Apple and Amazon respectively, and became soon the only digital formats that publishers could sell to the main vendors (actually, Google Play Books also sells PDF books).

While there are other reasons to rant about the current state of the ebook market, I gave some thought about what could be a likeable modern format for eBooks, and as you guessed, TiddlyWiki checked all the boxes:

  1. the book should be easy to open: the reading app could be the same browser that you used to buy the book, whether you are on your mobile or at your desktop;
  2. it should be readable both offline or online;
  3. it should open at the same place where you stopped reading last time;
  4. typesetting should be as beautiful and complex as a website can be;
  5. content should be truly multimedia, including live content from anywhere on the network. Audio books should be a mere byproduct of this feature;
  6. authors should be allowed to multiply standpoints on its content;
  7. readers should be able to reorganise the initial content, and also write above and around it;
  8. for the paranoids out there or those who missed Tim O'Reilly's famous piece on piracy back in the days, book content should be easy to encrypt. Ebooks lending to libraries might actually be a good use case.

So we at immatériel.fr considered that this territory was worth exploring and we dedicated our 2019 R&D efforts into building a TW5 alternative format for customers who were regularly buying ePubs at our experimental bookstore 7switch.com. We had to move forward on two fronts in parallel:

  • Converting our full catalog of 80K ePubs from more than 1000 (mostly French) publishers into TW5
  • Figuring a way to display books in an homogeneous way, yet familiar enough for both people reading content on the Web and people used to ePub reading apps, while showing off their new TiddlyWiki nature.

So I asked Jeremy if he'd welcome a sponsoring for such a project through his company Federatial and, to my awe, he said yes of course! Parallely, since I wasn't sure of how we should render the typical book elements nor the typical features of an ebook reading app in a TW5 interface, I asked JD, one of our gifted community contributors to TW5 user interfaces, for ideas and preliminary tests.


Soon enough, the three of us had regular meetings, that eventually led to a preliminary release of several great open source products that are now embedded into every non-DRM books and extracts that you'll find at the 7switch ebookstore:

  1. The first one is already included in the current prerelease of TW5: the dynaview plugin allows content to come into view dynamically in response to familiar gestures like scrolling.
  2. Next comes the dynannotate plugin, which will soon make its way to 5.1.22, and is already included in books and extracts that you can find on 7switch. With it, you can annotate content in a various number of ways.
  3. Then you'll find the ePub-slicer plugin, a tool to convert any ePub file into a plugin that essentially contains a list of small content chunks (aka tiddlers!) which can be revealed during the scroll as you read the book in the browser. Thanks to their plugin nature, not only multiple converted books can be hosted in a single TW5 file, but also one can override book content without fear, since the original shadow tiddlers could be retrieved at any time. Note that the HTML parsing is not yet complete, as we'd like to be able to parse any ePub, whether their content has been well semantised or not. So if you see spurious </li> or </blockquote> every once in a while, don't be surprised: you're looking at a work in progress.
  4. Finally, you'll also find JD's TW Book Wrapper plugin, which is responsible for most specific UI elements, from annotations management to the automatic language switching, based on your browser default language. By the way, we started with French and English as built-in interface languages. If you'd like to submit more translations, you're welcome!

Please have a try with any non-DRM books (or their extracts) that you'll find on 7switch. Also try to drag and drop your own ePubs (in so-called Author Mode) to add books in these TW5 containers. And tell us what you think!


Cheers, Xavier.

ILYA

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Mar 11, 2020, 7:29:03 AM3/11/20
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This is amazing. Very good idea.
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Mat

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Mar 11, 2020, 7:31:30 AM3/11/20
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Xavier Cazin wrote:


TL;DR: Go to ... click on "Read an extract"


tabort.png


(just cliarifying, to make sure you don't get the two sites mixed up which almost happened to me)

Xavier - this looks terrifique! Great simplified interface. Slick!

From where or How did you get that indicator for current tiddler in sidebar?

<:-)

Xavier Cazin

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Mar 11, 2020, 10:22:57 AM3/11/20
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Hi Mat!

On Wed, Mar 11, 2020 at 12:31 PM Mat <matia...@gmail.com> wrote:
Xavier Cazin wrote:


TL;DR: Go to ... click on "Read an extract"

tabort.png


(just cliarifying, to make sure you don't get the two sites mixed up which almost happened to me)

Hm, you mean that you have to manually change the bookstore language to EN in order to get Read an Extract? It is expected to follow your browser preferences, defaulting to EN if not FR, DE, ES or PT...
Xavier - this looks terrifique! Great simplified interface. Slick!

From where or How did you get that indicator for current tiddler in sidebar?

Maybe JD can answer this! The scroll indicator is a smart use of the new dynaview plugin, but I'm not sure I can explain the details.

Best,
Xavier.

Mat

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Mar 11, 2020, 10:53:59 AM3/11/20
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Hm, you mean that you have to manually change the bookstore language to EN in order to get Read an Extract?

No, it was only that button.

<:-)

Mohammad

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Mar 11, 2020, 11:34:37 AM3/11/20
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Xavier,
 Many thanks for sharing. This valuable edition deserves to have its own announcement thread. 

One question and two suggestions
Q1. Is there any tutorial for who likes write a book, for example "Applied Numerical Methods for Engineers", how he/she can do this with TW5-Ebook-powered?

S1. A theme (here I man just color palette) switch like night/day mode could be an advantage
S2. Choose a name for this amazing tool/edition

--Mohammad

Xavier Cazin

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Mar 11, 2020, 1:02:32 PM3/11/20
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 Many thanks for sharing. This valuable edition deserves to have its own announcement thread. 

Thank you Mohammad!
One question and two suggestions
Q1. Is there any tutorial for who likes write a book, for example "Applied Numerical Methods for Engineers", how he/she can do this with TW5-Ebook-powered?

This first experiment will hopefully show that a modern browser is enough to read any ePub more easily as with current ePub reading apps. Also to convince a few bookstores that TW5 html files can be sold as easily as ePubs or PDFs. But the next step may indeed be to explore native books, in order to get the most of TiddlyWiki.

Are you saying that the UI elements that we introduced (annotations, comments, scroll indicators, ehanced search) are compelling enough for an author to write a book rather than a wiki with TW5? If so, it means that we should indeed consider it as the basis of a future authoring framework rather than a smart container, and at least document what plugins are needed, and how to use them!

Your question leads to an almost philosophic one: what elements should we keep to call such or such document a book (that is, a lengthy structured content that is easy to write, easy to read, easy to store, and easy to sell)? I'd say we need one or more natural reading flows, a cover, one or more author names, a price, and that's it! Helping authors to design such reading flows is a very compelling goal for this framework-wannabe!

S1. A theme (here I mean just color palette) switch like night/day mode could be an advantage

Have a look at the Options tab in the sidebar :-)
S2. Choose a name for this amazing tool/edition

The hardest part!

Cheers,
Xavier.

Jeremy Ruston

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Mar 11, 2020, 1:11:32 PM3/11/20
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This has been a really fun project to work on, and many thanks to Xavier for making it happen. And a huge shout for JDs outstanding visual design work on the project.

At the beginning I was actually rather pessimistic about the feasibility of the central challenge of seamlessly scrolling through a book with hundreds of pages. Xavier had confidence that we could figure something out, and it turned out to be surprisingly straightforward to create a mechanism to wrap content in a “reveal” widget that is triggered when it is scrolled into view.

The dynaview plugin has been available for some time. There are a number of demos here:


Xavier’s vision is not just that we emulate the functionality of an existing ebook, but that we embrace  “active reading”: part of which is making highlights and notes that become part of the book.

Our first attempt involved modifying the text of the book to add annotations as macros: for example, <<highlight green “the river”>>. There are several challenges with this approach, so we ended up with the Dynannotate plugin that is built around a widget that displays overlays over the content that it contains.

You can try out the Dynannotate plugin here:


We’ll release the other two components, the “Epub Slicer” and “TW Book Wrapper” plugins shortly,

Best wishes

Jeremy. 




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Mohammad

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Mar 11, 2020, 1:19:36 PM3/11/20
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Thank you for quick reply Xavier!


On Wednesday, March 11, 2020 at 8:32:32 PM UTC+3:30, Xavier wrote:

 Many thanks for sharing. This valuable edition deserves to have its own announcement thread. 

Thank you Mohammad!
One question and two suggestions
Q1. Is there any tutorial for who likes write a book, for example "Applied Numerical Methods for Engineers", how he/she can do this with TW5-Ebook-powered?

This first experiment will hopefully show that a modern browser is enough to read any ePub more easily as with current ePub reading apps. Also to convince a few bookstores that TW5 html files can be sold as easily as ePubs or PDFs. But the next step may indeed be to explore native books, in order to get the most of TiddlyWiki.

Are you saying that the UI elements that we introduced (annotations, comments, scroll indicators, ehanced search) are compelling enough for an author to write a book rather than a wiki with TW5? If so, it means that we should indeed consider it as the basis of a future authoring framework rather than a smart container, and at least document what plugins are needed, and how to use them!

I assumed there may be hidden elements not introduced here! But it seems TW5-Powered ebook is the Reader! I think TW5 can be used for authoring. I see people write books in MsWord. I think TW5 has tools to acts more then MsWord, but as your Reader edition, it needs customized elements to be able to author a book.

One important think not specific to this case is: how to use a tool? Many people (including me) don't know how TW5 can be used for example for creating a software tutorial. TW5 in my opinion is quite wild (unleashed) and one needs to be trained to use it effectively and productively for a special purpose. 

For publishing, like other companies (for example Wily has a set of Latex templates for authoring books: everything is set, instruction for every item has been given,...), you need then to have such templates in TW5 if TW5 is going to be used for authoring book.
 

Your question leads to an almost philosophic one: what elements should we keep to call such or such document a book (that is, a lengthy structured content that is easy to write, easy to read, easy to store, and easy to sell)? I'd say we need one or more natural reading flows, a cover, one or more author names, a price, and that's it! Helping authors to design such reading flows is a very compelling goal for this framework-wannabe!

S1. A theme (here I mean just color palette) switch like night/day mode could be an advantage

Have a look at the Options tab in the sidebar :-)

Yep, I did not see that! :-)
 
S2. Choose a name for this amazing tool/edition

The hardest part!

I also recommend to have a small slideshow, videclip, ... to teach how to use TW5 Powered ebook. 

Cheers,
Xavier.

Thank you again
Mohammad 

Mohammad

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Mar 11, 2020, 1:27:48 PM3/11/20
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Hello Jeremy,
Many thanks for these amazing plugins. I love your work.

The links do not work. Please check! (seems the : cause the problem)

--Mohammad

Jeremy Ruston

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Mar 11, 2020, 1:32:31 PM3/11/20
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On 11 Mar 2020, at 17:27, Mohammad <mohammad...@gmail.com> wrote:

The links do not work. Please check! (seems the : cause the problem)

Urgh. I think Google Groups is trying to be clever and applying urldecode to the permalink.

Meanwhile, you can find both plugins in Control Panel in the “Plugins” tab.

Best wishes

Jeremy

Mohammad

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Mar 11, 2020, 1:45:54 PM3/11/20
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Thanks I found them!

On Wednesday, March 11, 2020 at 9:02:31 PM UTC+3:30, Jeremy Ruston wrote:

Mat

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Mar 11, 2020, 3:03:29 PM3/11/20
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@everyone

Don't make the mistake that I did to only read the TL;DR: in Xaviers post. For example... 
quote: "Converting our full catalog of 80K ePubs from more than 1000 (mostly French) publishers into TW5"
and the feature to highlight text in viewmode.

@Xavier
...as you can tell from my first comment in this thread, I didn't quite understand. Now - WOW! 

<:-)

Sylvain Naudin

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Mar 11, 2020, 4:55:33 PM3/11/20
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Bonsoir Xavier :)

As I said in the previous thread, congrats to you, Jeremy and JD for this beauty !

Just play again with it, really like the search result, it's focus on direct sentence and not like standard in title or content, more efficient with your version I think.

And well done with annotate function ; maybe the tricolore panel popup is a bit annoying for me, when you clic without selection, but I see that it's a different way to annotate a full section with color in marge.

Continue this god work,
Cheers,
Sylvain

TonyM

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Mar 11, 2020, 11:42:42 PM3/11/20
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Great stuff,

I commented previously on another thread. Just a Quick point, love the highlighting outside of edit mode. 

  • After selecting something, say in error, how can I deselect?
Regards
Tony

Xavier Cazin

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Mar 12, 2020, 5:39:27 AM3/12/20
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Great stuff,

Thanks Tony !

I commented previously on another thread. Just a Quick point, love the highlighting outside of edit mode. 

To reply to your question and Mohammad's about reusing some of the features we've developed in the course of this project, in order to publish native material, that's indeed a relatively low-hanging fruit that we'll probably pick this year, once everything is stabilised. But the risk is to settle for something that doesn't leverage the full power of TiddlyWiki, in terms of dynamic features and interactivity for instance. Being able to include the Sycom's leaflet maps plugin or BurningTreeC music sheets and midi plugin or simply a Youtube video into a book is of unmatched value in the publishing world!

So if we are talking about an authoring framework, I'd lean toward not limiting TiddlyWiki, but rather documenting it with book authors in mind. In fact, the so-called Authoring Mode that you get when you click on the yellow latch is just the unleashed TiddlyWiki. Maybe it could become a place where authors that are not familiar with TW5 get examples and documentation. I like the idea of providing authoring documentation in every single book released.

  • After selecting something, say in error, how can I deselect?

Highlights are in fact annotations without content. So if you click on your highlight, and then on the trash bin, it deletes the (empty) annotation.

Cheers,
Xavier.

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Xavier Cazin

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Mar 12, 2020, 5:52:15 AM3/12/20
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Hi Sylvain,

As I said in the previous thread, congrats to you, Jeremy and JD for this beauty !

Just play again with it, really like the search result, it's focus on direct sentence and not like standard in title or content, more efficient with your version I think.

Thank you, I agree that search comes very nicely and handy. This is one of the great features that the new Dynannotate plugin brings.
And well done with annotate function ; maybe the tricolore panel popup is a bit annoying for me, when you clic without selection, but I see that it's a different way to annotate a full section with color in marge.

Yes, it is not very clear that in this case you get a paragraph comment, but don't forget that it's a reading interface, eventhough an active one: the reader is not expected to click on the content unless (s)he wants to add something.
Best,
Xavier.

TiddlyTweeter

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Mar 12, 2020, 7:20:28 AM3/12/20
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Xavier Cazin wrote:

 https://www.7switch.com/fr/ebook/9783962558772/great-expectations-serapis-classics, click on "Read an extract" and play with it. Then come back if you'd like to know more.


Xavier, Jeremy, JD

That is a fabulous achievement! Basically you have achieved most ALL of the things I was looking for in a tool to read and edit linear documents!

Thank you!

I have some more technical questions. Is this the right place to ask them? Or do you have a repository you take queries in?

Anyway, these are a few thoughts & queries ---

1 - LOADING IMAGES? The dynamic loading is v. good and gets around some issues TW had with larger texts..

.    Does it work well with internal images?    

.    By way of support to Xavier I have a series of sketch illustrations by a woman artist for Great Expectations she may be willing to let you use freely. Let me know if you interested & I'll ask her and send them to you.

2 - EPUBBLE FORMAT? I'd like to understand Epubble better.

    The plugin says "The epubble format packages publications as a TiddlyWiki plugin. They can be created from off-the-shelf .epub files by using the epub-slicer plugin, or newly created publications can be authored directly in the new format for enhanced flexibility."

.   I'm interested in extending some work I have done converting Gutenberg texts to TW via regular expressions that are directly inserted into a TW. 
.   I'm wondering if I can convert such texts directly to a Epubble and using its extended features?
.   What is best way to find out more?

3 - "Scholar Format?" -- This is just a comment. In citation of novels for scholarship of literature a standard method is to reference  "Chap Num, Para Num". I'm wondering in annotations could know and record that info?

4 - "Bookmark reading points?" --- Just a comment. I may try adding a bookmark system. But thought that the annotation system might be extended simply to add a bookmark to a paragraph. Just re-open at last place I don't think is quite enough?

5 - Query: What about the saving? -- Something very interesting about it is its independent of current problems of reading tools (Kindle, Calibre etc). That is hugely helpful.
.    At same time there is the general issue of saving a TW. I'm just wondering how you will present that issue to buyers?

Best wishes
Josiah




Xavier Cazin

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Mar 12, 2020, 8:30:34 AM3/12/20
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Hi Josiah,

On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 12:20 PM TiddlyTweeter <Tiddly...@assays.tv> wrote:
Xavier Cazin wrote:

 https://www.7switch.com/fr/ebook/9783962558772/great-expectations-serapis-classics, click on "Read an extract" and play with it. Then come back if you'd like to know more.


Xavier, Jeremy, JD

That is a fabulous achievement! Basically you have achieved most ALL of the things I was looking for in a tool to read and edit linear documents!

Thank you!

Thank you, this is very encouraging!

I have some more technical questions. Is this the right place to ask them? Or do you have a repository you take queries in?

For now, GG is good enough :-)
Anyway, these are a few thoughts & queries ---

1 - LOADING IMAGES? The dynamic loading is v. good and gets around some issues TW had with larger texts..

.    Does it work well with internal images?    

Absolutely. You may want to "buy" this free book https://www.7switch.com/fr/ebook/9782759227730/emergence-of-infectious-diseases and see how the diagrams appear.
.    By way of support to Xavier I have a series of sketch illustrations by a woman artist for Great Expectations she may be willing to let you use freely. Let me know if you interested & I'll ask her and send them to you.

Thank you for your proposal but I'm not a publisher anymore. Actually, Great Expectations was just an example of an already published book. You could find thousands of other examples at the 7switch bookstore. If you buy a non-DRM book, you'll get 3 formats : ePub + Mobipocket + TW5. If you just want to read a free extract, you'll get it in TW5 only.
2 - EPUBBLE FORMAT? I'd like to understand Epubble better.

    The plugin says "The epubble format packages publications as a TiddlyWiki plugin. They can be created from off-the-shelf .epub files by using the epub-slicer plugin, or newly created publications can be authored directly in the new format for enhanced flexibility."

.   I'm interested in extending some work I have done converting Gutenberg texts to TW via regular expressions that are directly inserted into a TW. 
.   I'm wondering if I can convert such texts directly to a Epubble and using its extended features?

Not tested yet, even though there is nothing to prevent you to package such texts as ePubble
.   What is best way to find out more?

As of now, you can only study the ePubble plugins inside the book, sorry !
3 - "Scholar Format?" -- This is just a comment. In citation of novels for scholarship of literature a standard method is to reference  "Chap Num, Para Num". I'm wondering in annotations could know and record that info?

This kind of semantic information can certainly be addressed at the annotation level, but for now, we didn't work on this, since ePub structure is not semantised (one of its great weaknesses). Only the non-semantic ToC information is used for now.

4 - "Bookmark reading points?" --- Just a comment. I may try adding a bookmark system as annotation. But a thought that the annotation system might to extended simply to add a bookmark to a paragraph. Just re-open at last place I don't think is quite enough?

That's a feature that we need to refine, but clicking on the text without highlighting it creates a paragraph comment. This comment can be used as a bookmark in the sidebar.
5 - Query: What about the saving? -- Something very interesting about it is its independent of current problems of reading tools (Kindle, Calibre etc). That is hugely helpful.
.    At same time there is the general issue of saving a TW. I'm just wondering how you will present that issue to buyers?

If we used the browser local storage official plugin by default, it would retrieve user's own comments and annotations each time (s)he loads the book, so that a reader new to tiddlywiki wouldn't lose its added content. We probably should embed this feature by default. Other than that, we get the same limitations imposed by the browser to TiddlyWiki when saving the file on your local filesystem.

Thanks a lot for your useful comments.
Xavier.

TiddlyTweeter

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Mar 12, 2020, 10:08:37 AM3/12/20
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Thanks Xavier

Helpful answers, thanks.

1 - LOADING IMAGES? The dynamic loading is v. good and gets around some issues TW had with larger texts..

.    Does it work well with internal images?    

Absolutely. You may want to "buy" this free book https://www.7switch.com/fr/ebook/9782759227730/emergence-of-infectious-diseases and see how the diagrams appear.

I did. Useful to see. And topical. I also notice it has a few interesting "Inline" annotations (not working properly?) that look useful too!

Josiah

TiddlyTweeter

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Mar 12, 2020, 10:19:53 AM3/12/20
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Xavier, Jeremy & JD

This is my second comment on your great achievement.

Something that would transport well to ANY wiki is the SEARCH approach. It is text field focused with highlighting, BOTH  in the "hit list" (like Danielo did a long time ago) but also, importantly in the TEXTS themselves.

Annotation 2020-03-12 151812.jpg



I think that alone is a tool of wide relevance!

Best wishes
TT

Morgaine O'Herne

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Mar 12, 2020, 11:45:50 AM3/12/20
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This is wonderful! Now I want to write a novel.

Xavier Cazin

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Mar 12, 2020, 1:18:35 PM3/12/20
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Hi Morgaine,

Thank you! I'd love to showcase a novel that uses TW5 features natively to beef up characters and story...

Cheers,
-- Xavier

Morgaine O'Herne

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Mar 12, 2020, 3:18:42 PM3/12/20
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Tiddlywiki would be perfect for choose-your-own-adventure books!


On Wednesday, March 11, 2020 at 4:33:57 AM UTC-6, Xavier Cazin wrote:

Joshua Fontany

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Mar 13, 2020, 3:28:08 AM3/13/20
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Xavier, Jeremy, JD,

WOW. This is very impressive. I have been considering how I would "re-present" a PDF/ebook as a Tiddlywiki and this exceeds most of what I came up with!

To springboard from Morgaine's comment about choose-you-own-adventure books, I specifically was thinking about how to present RPG Source Books (Adventure-Modules, Monser-Manuals, etc) as Tiddlywiki plugins.

I  noticed the Dynannotate plugin while updating my fork of the TW5 repository, but didn't have the context for the project.

I would love to discuss this more, as I think it would eventually be worth approaching the couple of RPG publishing companies I have friends at (one of which is a brand new french-language brand). Synchronicities abound. ;)

Best,
Joshua Fontany

Xavier Cazin

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Mar 13, 2020, 3:36:18 AM3/13/20
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Hi Josiah,

Your screenshot perfectly captures the alliance between the super cool features from Jeremy's Dynaview and the super handy UI from JD' TW Book Wrapper. I should have mentioned Search in my announcement as a prominent feature of TW that is also mandatory for books. 

Right now you, I think you can try multiple-book search only if you first drag and drop an already sliced ePub plugin from another TW book.

Cheers,
Xavier.

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Xavier Cazin

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Mar 13, 2020, 7:06:56 AM3/13/20
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Hi Joshua,

Thank you, your appreciation is very valuable! As of today, immatériel would be able to distribute worldwide the catalog of any publishing house that would include books in TiddlyWiki format. I'd be glad to pursue this discussion further: don't hesitate to contact me directly.

For anyone out there who is willing to publish such a book independently, it may be more difficult. I'm not sure, but maybe we can create a dedicated imprint to gather such efforts...

Best regards,
-- Xavier Cazin


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PMario

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Mar 13, 2020, 11:54:41 AM3/13/20
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Hi Xavier,

That's an interesting approach. Well done!

---------------------

The only thing that annoyed me, was that the laptop fans started after a view minutes, as I did play with TWebooks. 

Having a closer look, I saw, that CPU load seems to be a problem.

I'm using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, FireFox 74 (latest). The Laptop has an intel Core I7 and 16GByte of ram. So there shouldn't be any problems with the CPU load.

Just wanted to let you know.
-mario

Xavier Cazin

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Mar 13, 2020, 12:30:57 PM3/13/20
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Thank you Mario for your feedback. Your CPU load increase is indeed worrisome. Could you tell us which book(s) you are using for testing?

Cheers,
-- Xavier


On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 4:54 PM PMario <pmar...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Xavier,

That's an interesting approach. Well done!

---------------------

The only thing that annoyed me, was that the laptop fans started after a view minutes, as I did play with TWebooks. 

Having a closer look, that CPU load seems to be a problem.

I'm using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, FireFox 74 (latest). The Laptop has an intel Core I7 and 16GByte of ram. So there shouldn't be any problems with the CPU load.

Just wanted to let you know.
-mario

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PMario

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Mar 13, 2020, 12:38:00 PM3/13/20
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On Friday, March 13, 2020 at 5:30:57 PM UTC+1, Xavier wrote:
Thank you Mario for your feedback. Your CPU load increase is indeed worrisome. Could you tell us which book(s) you are using for testing?

Hi,
The one you linked in the first post. ... I did try a second one, which I don't know anymore. ... Same thing happened.

Then I did download the "first" ebook to my mobile. Also tested with FF for Android. Couldn't see any problems there.
I'll have a closer look about the battery load. ... But nothing special for now.

Again. Nice work!
-mario

Xavier Cazin

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Mar 13, 2020, 12:51:58 PM3/13/20
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I'll have a closer look about the battery load. ... But nothing special for now.

Again. Nice work!

Thanks Mario! There are almost 60K books in German that you can test here: https://www.7switch.com/de/list/drmfree/lang-ger/new/territory-FR/page/1/price :-)
Cheers,
-- Xavier.

Thomas Elmiger

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Mar 14, 2020, 11:12:19 AM3/14/20
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Wow! Congrats to the whole team.

At first sight, the search features impressed me most, other parts resemble ideas I had myself (e.g. 1 tiddler per paragraph). I will have to explore more.

There are almost 60K books in German that you can test here: https://www.7switch.com/de/list/drmfree/lang-ger/new/territory-FR/page/1/price :-)

 
By the way: If you delete "Einen" then the text would fit on the button shown below also in German. And it would not harm the meaning in any way. (In Switzerland we always assume French would take up most space.)

Bildschirmfoto 2020-03-14 um 16.01.03.png

Last and least: Languages symbolised by flags as on your website often don’t match. I read books in German, but I am Swiss so the German flag does not appeal to me in the way it might be intended. Possibly it is the same for English speaking Canadians or US citicens.


All the best,

Thomas


Alex Hough

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Mar 14, 2020, 12:19:53 PM3/14/20
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JUST WOW!

Everything I love about TW on this thread. Innovation, cooperation, comments from around the world

Thank you Xavier, Jeremy and JD! 

Alex

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TiddlyTweeter

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Mar 15, 2020, 9:55:51 AM3/15/20
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Thomas

I might be very interesting to combine this with your own work on "seamless texts"? 
Your visual layout for them was Good.
The bookmarking was also excellent.

Striking with the three's solution in the end result is performance the "overlays" & the text search.

If you ever did I'd be interested!

Best wishes
TT

Xavier Cazin

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Mar 15, 2020, 1:30:32 PM3/15/20
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Hallo Thomas,

Thank you for your kind words!
 
 By the way: If you delete "Einen" then the text would fit on the button shown below also in German. And it would not harm the meaning in any way. (In Switzerland we always assume French would take up most space.)

Bildschirmfoto 2020-03-14 um 16.01.03.png

 
Thank you, I've committed the change. It will be hopefully deployed early next week ;-)

Last and least: Languages symbolised by flags as on your website often don’t match. I read books in German, but I am Swiss so the German flag does not appeal to me in the way it might be intended. Possibly it is the same for English speaking Canadians or US citicens.

You are absolutely right, we tend to overlook these issues, as there seems to be no good interface solution! I'll work with my colleagues upon your comments, and try to come with something more satisfying.
(any suggestions welcome of course :-)

Cheers,
Xavier.

Ed Heil

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Jun 25, 2020, 12:44:25 PM6/25/20
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Was the "epub slicer" ever released publicly?

Xavier Cazin

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Jun 25, 2020, 1:02:08 PM6/25/20
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Hi Ed,

Not yet ready because of some pressing redesign, but it will eventually be released as a normal plugin, hopefully via some Community Plugin Library that TW5 greatest minds have given thought to recently.

Cheers,
-- Xavier Cazin


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Ed Heil

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Jun 25, 2020, 5:29:52 PM6/25/20
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Thanks, Xavier!
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TiddlyTweeter

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Jun 27, 2020, 12:42:58 PM6/27/20
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Xavier

There is interest in it growing.

I think the very good PERFORMANCE aspect is particularly interesting since eBooks are large documents.

Over in GG we did some tests with Dynaview but still hitting issues which the eBook version does not have. I think better understanding the eBook edition of TW will help a lot.

Fingers crossed x

Best wishes
TT

Xavier Cazin

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Jun 29, 2020, 11:20:51 AM6/29/20
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Hi TT,

In order to fulfil some of the user interface requirements, like keeping track of the current reading location or creating annotations anywhere inside the text, Jeremy introduced Dynaview, then Dynannotate.  In the context of ePub reading, Dynaview's aim is to reveal on demand the little chunks that have been produced at ePub parse time, along with their possible annotations. Once you have this collection of chunks (aka tiddlers), the performance, while still subject to optimisation, is not much of a worry: these chunks are not tangled nor even weaved together through any complex cross-references system. At the time Dynaview comes into play, the list of chunks is already sorted, waiting to be displayed at reading pace. That's because ePub is a much poorer and linear format than TiddlyWiki of course. Fortunately, what can do more, can do less.

By the way, being able to split any ePub into chunks is probably the hardest part of the project. Not only because choosing the chunks limits can be hard, but also because styles are often used very loosely by publishers : for instance, you may find paragraphs that are expressed as <span style="font-size: 11pt;display: block;text-indent: 0pt;">The first paragraph of a section, as you have to guess.</span> because the WYSIWYG tools that helped producing the ePub are generally misleading. I spare you the table and images issues :-)

Cheers,
-- Xavier Cazin


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