Re: Image sizes

I've been somewhat ignoring the image size limit in my submissions to
PG, and mostly submit images with the longest edge limited to 720
pixels. Scans of square B&W woodcuts with lots of detail will then
occasionally reach 200kB. For images where the detail is really
important, such as maps, I include a linked through high-res version as
well. (my ePub tool generates all the wrapping HTML required for them
automatically).

I generate my own ePubs using my own code (but never submit them to PG,
as it won't taken them, but will set up my own site in the near future
to do so), which are generated from a TEI master. In theory, I could set
up a server to generate tweaked ePubs for various limited devices
(without images, with small images, and with large images, and even with
the page images included: just store the high-res images and the TEI
masters on the server and run the code to generate ePub on demand),
however, I think such a system is not worth the engineering effort
required, as readers will quickly evolve.

My experience with (android tablet) epub readers is that they often do a
very bad job in handling even ePub 2.0: tables are ignored, CSS is
ignored, images are scaled in horrendous ways, character set support is
minimal, and so on. It is not for nothing "professional" publishers
often only include tables as images. On the PC platform, it is somewhat
better. I've found Readium (a chrome plugin) does a decent job in
handling certain ePub3 features (such as the ePubs I made with a Project
Gutenberg text synchronized with a LibreVox spoken book, using a tool
called Tobi) -- note that such ePubs with embedded audio can get really
large.

I've always refused to dumb-down my HTML output for the limitations of
PG's ePub generation tools. I think the generation of ePub from HTML
when a TEI master is available is getting you the worst of both worlds.

So far, ePubs work reasonable well for flat text, but anything involving
more than that will not be up-to-standards yet, and I am afraid, there
is little incentive to improve this, as publishers will quickly switch
to PDF once the ePub going gets tough.

Jeroen.

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