Old English people on the list may have guessed: what I've been working on is a prototype or proof-of-concept of my Old English textbook as an e-book. You can seen it here (still partial; the easiest/free way to look at it is with the FireFox EPubReader add-on):
http://faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/secret/oeg.epub
I'm wondering what medievalists here think of the textbook as e-book. The iPad is bearing down on us; many e-readers are on the market; sales of e-books are doubling every year. I love good old paper books, but I've fascinated by the technology.
Peter
Peter Baker wrote:
Thanks to everyone who has replied so far. Some great ideas here. So far Travis's approach has worked best--with some little alterations mainly for making lines wrap elegantly and for working around problems with e-book readers. Here's the css:
.verse-container div {margin-left: 7em; text-indent: -2em;} .verse-container div span {display: block; float: left; margin-left: -5em;} .hypermetric div {margin-left: 6em; text-indent: -2em;} .hypermetric div span {display: block; float: left; margin-left: -4em;}
I substituted div for p because Stanza insists on its own formatting for p. And I use em instead of px to scale better with the device. The HTML looks like this:
<div class="verse-container"> <div>Oft him ānhaga āre gebīdeð,</div> <div>Metudes miltse, þēah þe hē mōdcearig</div> <div>geond lagulāde longe sceolde</div> <div>hrēran mid hondum hrīmcealde sǣ,</div> <div><span>5</span>wadan wræclāstas. Wyrd bið ful ārǣd.</div> </div>
Nice and clean. The only remaining problem is that the Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) e-book reader doesn't move the left margin of the span as far left as the CSS tells it to do, and this causes collisions between line number and line in the hypermetric verses, where the left margin is narrower and there's less margin for error. So I've had to make the left margin wider than I had it before to compensate. It looks like a waste of space on an iPod screen, but in a browser window the spaciousness is rather pleasant.
Grant Simpson's approach looked to be working well, but it ran afoul of a bug in the Stanza reader, which for some reason makes a block containing a line number disappear unless it is inside the div for the line. Don't ask me why: but as I've been haunting the mobileread forums for a couple of weeks I can say that the CSS processing in Stanza and ADE is well known to be flaky.
I expect the e-book reader in the iPad to be much better, as it will presumably use the Safari layout engine.
Thanks again to everyone, Peter