AO3 Archive New Feature!

[amalthia]

The Archive of Our Own has released new code for the archive that'll allow users to export stories into epub, mobipocket, html, and pdf.

I've done some testing and I love what they've accomplished. The stories retain the correct metadata, such as author and title, there is a working Table of Contents, and based on your user preferences, the user can select how the file is named when it downloads. (which I thought was awesome.) :)

The only downside at the moment is that I don't think there is any way to customize how the epub will look before the story is exported onto your computer. Though I'm confident in time there may be options to pick your preferred font, font-size, and whether or not you want spaces between your paragraphs or indents. Based on how responsive the coders and the A03 team have been before I think it's possible customization features may already be in the works.

I'm very excited about this new feature because it opens the door to reading a lot more fan fiction without having to go through a lot of effort.

Comments

Re: repost - for repeating sentence...

[slyprentice.livejournal.com]

I'm definitely going to have to check it out and see, then. I have a 300 and am not entirely pleased with the size of the screen and usually have to up-size the font on anything I'm reading. If the size they use for AO3 is workable, I'll be thrilled to pieces.

I've dealt with the underlined chapters thing before and can say honestly that it doesn't bother me overly much. It might on another device, though.

Re: repost - for repeating sentence...

[amalthia]

Let me know how it turns out. :)

For some reason I thought the fonts on the 300 would seem too big?

Re: repost - for repeating sentence...

[slyprentice.livejournal.com]

I just tried it on a couple different stories (to make sure of the consistency) and it works fabulous! The font is just the right size (for me) and the text is clean -- lately I've been having a lot of issues with quotation marks turning into questions marks, though I have no idea why.


The standard font on the 300 is essentially the same as the font of a standard paperback book (perhaps a wee bit smaller), which works because the 300 is about the size of a paperback. The problem (for me) is that unless I format an e-book myself (or download it from the E-Lib), the font will be smaller (roughly around 8pt) and that's really not workable on a small screen.

It might be the downloader I use, though. I recently switched to Graffer and haven't run into that problem as much as I used to, even if I still find it extremely annoying when I do. Damn bad eyesight... *grumbles*

Re: repost - for repeating sentence...

[amalthia]

This is good to hear. :) I wasn't sure if you wanted indents in your stories or the paragraph space but I've been doing some testing with converting the epubs to epub and I thought this css override code worked rather well.

body { margin: 0; }
a {text-decoration: none; color: black;}
a [href] {text-decoration: none; color: black;}
p {margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; padding: 0pt; text-indent: 15pt; text-align: justify;}
h1 { text-align: center;}
h2 {text-align: center; }
h3 { text-align: center;}

I was going to make a post about. I'm not sure if you use Calibre to convert stories or not. But I think I'll be doing this.

I'm also happy that Calibre will now automatically convert smartquotes and em-dashes and ellipses to non-smart quote versions. :)