[Sca-cooks] Looking for some feedback on a new Florilegium format

[Stefan li Rous]

Alec Story said:
<<< One thing to be aware of if you move to PDFs is that PDFs display terribly on small screens, while good HTML reflows to fit the screen size very nicely.  If you move to PDFs, you may find that people on mobile devices avoid your site. >>>

Ah, thank you. Due to my eyesight problems I don’t use my iPhone as much for web and email access as I’d originally planned on. Although I can now do much better with my larger iPhone 6s Plus, I still do most of my web viewing on my iPad or desktop Mac. So I really wasn’t aware of whether this affected other people or not.

<<< The number of people using primarily mobile devices is not actually that small today, and is only going to grow.  I might also point out that the current layout is pretty mobile-hostile, since the fonts get itty-bitty on mobile.  I'm not sure how much of that is fixable given how badly word generates html (1) >>>

Unfortunately, captured emails have inserted carriage returns at the end of each line. Unfortunately, it has been impossible for me to remove these by computer, since it is difficult to differential between carriage returns at the end of each line which I want to remove, and carriage returns at the end of paragraphs which I want to keep.

While I sometimes try to remove the end-of-line carriage returns by hand, it is time-consuming so I often can’t do it.

So my message files (-msg) are likely to still be problematic on small screen devices.

Articles with better formatting are unlikely to have this problem, although if I freeze the format by using PDF, they might still be problematic on small devices.

Glenn said:
>>> Of course PDF's can be designed in a responsive layout now.  But since the common reason for PDFs is to fix the layout for print, and not many people know how to make responsive PDF's or have Acrobat handy, then this is probably a mute point.

I’m not I can guarantee that any PDFs submitted to me will follow this format. I have enough trouble just getting people to submit things. :-(  . And yes, I do have a number of submissions that I haven’t been able to translate from PDF and use. Once I’ve gotten the display/formatting problems solved, I plan on getting a lot of these online.

I’m leaning toward coverting the submitted PDF files to HTML, if I can find a good method/program and perhaps including a copy of the PDF available as a link, as I do the original Word or RTF file, for the editors. Editors are supposed to let me know when they publish something from the Florilegium, but either they aren’t letting me know or they aren’t republishing from the Florilegium, in which case I’m spending a lot of effort trying to help them, for nothing.

Stefan
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THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
   Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          StefanliRous at gmail.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marksharris
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****