Hyphenation in Stanza

April 1, 2010

Hyphenation in Stanza

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India, Ink., has moved. The live version of this post is now located at http://ink.indiamos.com/2010/04/01/hyphenation-in-stanza/. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Okay! I’ve got basically one month left in which to do my thesis project, so I’m thinking I should try to blog about a little something every day, to force myself to process some of this stuff. Perhaps call it BroTheBloPoMo—Brooklyn Thesis Blog Post Month.

What have I been up to? Well, unless you count reading a lot of trashy novels as e-books, not a whole hell of a lot. But, man, I am rocking the e-book–reading.

It’s not entirely not research. For one thing, I’ve been learning an awful lot about the hyphenation rules in Stanza. They suck. Every time I see what would be counted as an unacceptable break in a dead-tree American trade book, I note it in an annotation. Stanza then lets me view a list of all my annotations, from which I can jump to each offending passage. I’ve also been marking misspellings, logic errors, and infelicitous organization of material (e.g., loading the front of an e-book with tons of sales crap—I’ve already bought the book; just get to the text, please), but those are editorial issues rather than technological ones.¹

Some typical composition errors seen in Stanza (not all of which, especially in the last column, are Stanza’s fault):

Multiple punctuation marks	Word division	Broken compounds	Miscellaneous weirdness
you? ” he	again- st	gauntlet—some- thing	father—- passed
Cathedral —”	the- se	gentle- men—who	me—- turn
have —?”	S- tay	Indian—ob- tained	people— the
boy? ”	bare-ch- ested	hard- ness—feel	average— of
they? ”	S- tarling	German—some- thing	anyway— neither
it? ”	respon- se	mar- riage—or	life— touring
it? ” Jasper	ch- in	cof- fee-brown	this— they
then? ”	six- th	Ex- cept”—she	them— as
him? ” Rebecca	ch- estnut	ill-re- pute	too— she
down? ”	Sh- effield	self-con- scious	him— where
“— he	ch- intz	old-fash- ioned	too— a
him? ” he	ch- in	rose-be- decked	encouragingly— and
	modis- tes	sweet-na- tured	so— she
	on- ce	twen- ty-seven	circle— the
	s- pars	Ex- pensive-looking	referred— she
	ch- intzy	heavy-lid ded	now- predictable
	o’- clock	like- ly-looking	cleft-—“I’ll
	child—y- our	late-sum- mer	large— He
	per- ch	wa- ter-filled	for-sake
	seven- th	morn- ing-room
	re- al	four- teen-year-old
	prince—n- ever	stir- rer-up
	belowstairs—k- itchens	it- self—it
	champag- ne	well-be- ing
	Th- ese	it—ex- cessively
	you—n- ever	coun- try-bred
	urns—w- ere	moth- er-in-law
	the- se	John-the-Bap- tist

You get the idea. These are from multiple books, but many of the nastiest breaks—ch-in, ch-est, again-st, the-se, on-ce, n-ever—appear over and over again. Stanza’s still my e-reader application of choice, but that’s mostly because it’s so easy to download my Fictionwise bookshelf into it. I’ve been buying my e-books almost exclusively from Fictionwise, so that’s key.

(Cross-posted at my schoolwork blog, which nobody reads)

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1. Though they could be technological issues. It would be great if the e-reading app had a built-in means of reporting typos to the publisher, so that they could be corrected for future downloads; or perhaps the reader could just correct the word in his or her own copy. Clever Eucalyptus encourages users to send screenshots of bad typesetting, presumably so algorithms can be tweaked.

   The Eucalyptus feedback system:
   
   
   

   And if the front matter, ad card, and the like were marked as such, the e-reader software could then offer users choices such as “hide all front matter” or “display front matter at end of book.” I’d want a global setting, so all my books open to the first page of the main text and have any extraneous material glommed on at the very end.

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