[Next production] The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night

[Robin Whittleton]

It’s been increasingly clear that it’s only a matter of time before Pepys loses the crown as longest SE production, so let’s see what I can do about that. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night is a ten-volume work collecting the Arabian Nights tales, translated by Richard F. Burton. On top of that, there are a further set of volumes with a load of supporting material and notes. So, if I drop in all the volumes from PG to an SE skeleton, what does that come to?

$ se word-count .

2802438

Should be on top of the pile for a while longer 😄

There are two transcriptions on PG. I’ve picked this set primarily because it’s a later printing and a later transcription, and seems at a glance more accurate. There is also the Poole translation, but it seems to be Burton’s that’s stood the test of time more effectively. Repo is at https://github.com/robinwhittleton/anonymous_the-book-of-the-thousand-nights-and-a-night_richard-f-burton.

I imagine I’ll probably end up doing some filler productions as well during this beast, but let’s see how it goes.

-Robin

[Alex Cabal]

That's serious business!

What kind of supporting material is there besides endnotes? Do we
actually want all of it or is it more like something to be read at
Wikipedia or other scholarly sources?

There will be lots of great cover art opportunities here. The headline
painting at Wikipedia is already pretty excellent.

On 5/29/23 1:59 AM, Robin Whittleton wrote:
> It’s been increasingly clear that it’s only a matter of time before
> Pepys loses the crown as longest SE production, so let’s see what I can

> do about that. /The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night/ is a

> ten-volume work collecting the Arabian Nights tales, translated by
> Richard F. Burton. On top of that, there are a further set of volumes
> with a load of supporting material and notes. So, if I drop in all the
> volumes from PG to an SE skeleton, what does that come to?
>
> $ se word-count .
> 2802438
>
> Should be on top of the pile for a while longer 😄
>
> There are two transcriptions on PG. I’ve picked this set

> <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=%22A+Plain+and+Literal+Translation+of+the+Arabian+Nights+Entertainments%22> primarily because it’s a later printing and a later transcription, and seems at a glance more accurate. There is also the Poole translation, but it seems to be Burton’s that’s stood the test of time more effectively. Repo is at https://github.com/robinwhittleton/anonymous_the-book-of-the-thousand-nights-and-a-night_richard-f-burton <https://github.com/robinwhittleton/anonymous_the-book-of-the-thousand-nights-and-a-night_richard-f-burton>.

>
> I imagine I’ll probably end up doing some filler productions as well
> during this beast, but let’s see how it goes.
>
> -Robin
>

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[Robin Whittleton]

There are 6 supplemental volumes. They’re 90% composed of ”Supplemental nights” and variants that didn’t fit into the original 1001 Nights. The other 10% seems to be appendices, glossaries, and essays. At a guess, I’d say that we want to keep them all? More info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stories_within_One_Thousand_and_One_Nights .

I’m going to start by keeping the volume structure, then can evaluate afterwards if we want to drop it.

-Robin

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[Alex Cabal]

OK. Supplemental stories, forewords, prefaces, etc., to volumes we would
want to keep. Glossaries are a maybe, I think it depends on how obscure
the references are.

On 5/31/23 1:53 AM, Robin Whittleton wrote:
> There are 6 supplemental volumes. They’re 90% composed of ”Supplemental
> nights” and variants that didn’t fit into the original 1001 Nights. The
> other 10% seems to be appendices, glossaries, and essays. At a guess,
> I’d say that we want to keep them all? More info at

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stories_within_One_Thousand_and_One_Nights <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stories_within_One_Thousand_and_One_Nights> .

> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/4AC0E6D3-C87A-4B52-9421-96F8AA57E48B%40reala.net <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/4AC0E6D3-C87A-4B52-9421-96F8AA57E48B%40reala.net?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.

[Robin Whittleton]

There’s a fair bit of markup in the supplemental material 😅

[Robin Whittleton]

Still working through the frontmatter and there’s already considerably more CSS than most productions I do. Seeing as there’s no network stalling on CSS @import statements in an epub bundle, what do we think of using @import to modularise the CSS slightly into sectioned chunks?

-Robin

> On 12 Aug 2023, at 10:41, Robin Whittleton <ro...@reala.net> wrote:
>
> There’s a fair bit of markup in the supplemental material 😅
>

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> <Screenshot 2023-08-12 at 10.34.13.png>

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[Alex Cabal]

I don't know if ereader would support that. It would also deviate from
the standard. I think there's room to explore modularizing CSS in
general, because we have a lot of copy and paste which could be linted
if we somehow knew what it was. But it would be a project-wide thing.

[Robin Whittleton]

Seeing as other people are giving status updates on their monster projects, here’s where I am with this. Having sorted out the front matter and split up the books I decided to start on the endnotes, but realised after only a couple of hundred of the 8,200 total just how much work this was going to be and got seriously dispirited.

To make some progress again on this, I’ve put the endnotes to one side and am currently working on bringing the 10 volumes of stories up to SE’s standard structure. Luckily, the main text is mostly simple, but we’ll see what the 6 supplemental volumes are like when I get to them.

One question I did have: there’s couplet verse all the way through, where each line is separated by a symbol, and the first parts have the same width:

I’ve got this working with display:table, specifying a cell of each part of the line. The overflow unfortunately though is then constrained to the cell which I don’t think is good enough:

I can’t myself work out a way of getting this working properly, even with modern CSS. I asked on Mastodon, but the only solution that didn’t recommend preprocessing was too hacky to be appropriate for us. So what do you think: drop this behaviour and just left-align all the couplets? Or keep the display: table and associated overflow? Or alternatively try to pre-process the widths, knowing that a change of font will probably throw it out of alignment?

-Robin 

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[Alex Cabal]

Hmmm.. I can't think of an obvious solution, especially given the
constraints of ereader CSS. We should first think of how the fallback
solution will be structured/rendered in bad ereaders like Kindle. Then,
we can work forwards to see if we can do some kind of @supports()
solution somehow. Maybe grid? Let me think about it.

This does bring to mind the Boswell and Golden Bough threads from today.
If you're feeling like this is too much, maybe someone wants to join in
and help you work on it...

On 3/29/24 1:15 PM, Robin Whittleton wrote:
> Seeing as other people are giving status updates on their monster
> projects, here’s where I am with this. Having sorted out the front
> matter and split up the books I decided to start on the endnotes, but
> realised after only a couple of hundred of the 8,200 total just how much
> work this was going to be and got seriously dispirited.
>
> To make some progress again on this, I’ve put the endnotes to one side
> and am currently working on bringing the 10 volumes of stories up to
> SE’s standard structure. Luckily, the main text is mostly simple, but
> we’ll see what the 6 supplemental volumes are like when I get to them.
>
> One question I did have: there’s couplet verse all the way through,
> where each line is separated by a symbol, and the first parts have the
> same width:
>

> Screenshot 2024-03-20 at 07.41.47.jpeg
>
> I’ve got this working with display:table, specifying a cell of each part
> of the line. The overflow unfortunately though is then constrained to
> the cell which I don’t think is good enough:
>

> Screenshot 2024-03-29 at 19.10.15.png
>
> I can’t myself work out a way of getting this working properly, even
> with modern CSS. I asked on Mastodon

> <https://front-end.social/@robinwhittleton/112126661612677465>, but the
> only solution
> <https://codepen.io/giana/pen/ExJWaaE/c231b2e87aeb5ee366effc99af6ea86d> that didn’t recommend preprocessing was too hacky to be appropriate for us. So what do you think: drop this behaviour and just left-align all the couplets? Or keep the display: table and associated overflow? Or alternatively try to pre-process the widths, knowing that a change of font will probably throw it out of alignment?

>> visithttps://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/dcf60e28-5507-4970-d2cc-52e0bf6dfe4c%40standardebooks.org <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/dcf60e28-5507-4970-d2cc-52e0bf6dfe4c%40standardebooks.org>.

>
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[Robin Whittleton]

Might be worth pointing out that every time the book has a couplet layout that would be too obviously broken it falls back to unalignment, sometimes even in the same verse:

[Alex Cabal]

If when the 2nd parts wrap, they just wrap to the beginning of the 1st
part, then maybe we can just call the entire thing one line and put a
regular bullet inbetween them. It won't align as nicely, but I can't
think of a reasonable way to achieve this given our limited CSS. (And
it's not like they perfectly align in print anyway.)

On 3/31/24 4:32 AM, Robin Whittleton wrote:
> Might be worth pointing out that every time the book has a couplet layout that would be too obviously broken it falls back to unalignment, sometimes even in the same verse:
>
>
>
>

> For the time being I’ve been marking up only those verses that are specifically typeset in the source scans as being aligned with the additional class and spans necessary.
>
> If we decide to remove this then it shouldn’t be that difficult to find and replace. Alternatively, if we work out a successful CSS approach and decide to add it to everything then again, find and replace should be possible.
>
> -Robin

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>

[Emma Sweeney]

You may want to use caesura structuring, so you can add some spacing between the two parts. Also, this would make it easy to use the "content" property to add the bullets.

Emma

[Robin Whittleton]

OK, both replies sound good.

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