Questions -- how do I ... ?

So, here are some of my questions:

Thanks in advance for any help.

Roger Sperberg

No lists are supported by fb2. Just use
<p>1. item</p>

Thank you for responding.

Thanks for the clarification.

I've thought about how best to mark this up -- still getting my sea legs on how and when to add sections with and without titles -- and I see you're right here.

I've written to FBReader to implement just what I had asked here, -- there's more to the expectations one places on the e-reader than I have considered.

But still I think there's a difference worth noting between what librarians consider a title and what is not.

For instance, there's a new book out called The Search. To explain what it's about, the subtitle is "How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture."

Or what about S is for Silence? The subtitle explains that it is "A Kinsey Millhone Mystery." The subtitle isn't part of the title -- it provides additional information about the book.

For display, sure you can put these inside two <p> tags in a <title> element. But then there's no distinction between this title and subtitle and a book with a long title broken into two lines like George Carlin's book, When Will Jesus Bring the Porkchops?

Whether the title is distinguished from the subtitle as two elements in the metadata, or as separate children of a title, I still maintain that that is useful and structural information about the book, not presentation.

Perhaps adding some way to support thouse 2-level titles i a good idea. It was discused here once and it is here again so I guess it's something usable for fb3, you are right.

Have any ideas how to implement this?

Well, to answer your question: Start with the current format, in which the <description> element has a child called <title-info>. And <title-info> has a child called <book-title>

(I know you know this, GribUser, but I repeat it here for newcomers who read this post in the future Smile

If you are OK with mixed content, then <book-title> could have a child called <book-subtitle>. So that, using a previously cited example, it would look like this:

<book-title>The Search<book-subtitle>How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture</book-subtitle></book-title>

If you disallow mixed content, you could do add a container element and keep <book-title> as the element whose content is the title:

<full-title>
<book-title>Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!<book</book-title>
<book-subtitle>Adventures of a Curious Character</book-subtitle>
<short-title>Surely You're Joking</short-title>
</full-title>

Well, this example incorporates a separate suggestion, which is to provide the e-reader with a short display name to serve the function that a running head does in a print book -- only with an e-book it might show up as a window title or the label in a tab (for e-readers that could keep multiple e-books open).

I have another suggestion regarding titles. Having worked with a list of 18,000 movies (even a small library would have more titles), I'd also suggest a <sort-as> element as a child of <full-title> for something like this:

<full-title>
<book-title>The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins<book</book-title>
<short-title>500 Hats</short-title>
<sort-as>five hundred hats of bartholomew cubbins, the</sort-as>
</full-title>

Being able to move an article to the end of the sort title is helpful even with titles that don't use numbers. For instance, it enables the library module to put "The Search" and "A Simple Guide to Chinese Cooking" into its list of titles that begin with S.

Adding <sort-as> has the added benefit of being usable with authors' names:

<author>
<first-name>Antoine</first-name>
<last-name>de Saint-Exupéry</last-name>
<sort-as>Saint-Exupéry, de, Antoine</sort-as>
</author>

OK. Enough with my suggestions.

I think adding <book-subtitle> (and the other elements suggested) could be restricted to the metadata or description section of the FB file. As long as it can be separately identified, then it wouldn't need to appear in <body>. Of course, to properly solve the display issue I brought up, the e-reader would be expected (obligated?) to display the <book-title> and <book-subtitle> (and probably <author> when it opened a book. Then the formatting could clearly distinguish between long (2-line) titles and books with a subtitle.

Roger