Show HN: Personalize Romeo and Juliet or Pride and Prejudice

http://www.textusclassics.com/

by rhythmvs • 9 years ago

56 36 9 years ago

nitemice• 9 years ago

So basically is an adult, public-domain version of those books you can get for children, where they insert their name in the story. e.g. http://www.simplypersonalized.com/product/personalized-spide...

Neeek• 9 years ago

I guess if you ignore the whole publishing thing, which to me is the interesting part :P

rhythmvs11• 9 years ago

Definitely! This is but a sneak preview for our upcoming product, which powers this whole search/replace/print spin-off: a typographic intelligence engine, which analyzes arbitrary text input, and then designs, templates and typesets into top-grade publications, everything automated, including cover design. That way, book publishing may indeed become as easy as drag-and-drop.

See for yourself: the input we used for pride-and-prejudice.textusclassics.com is on Github: https://github.com/textvs/Pride-and-Prejudice_1342 — It took our engine ~50 seconds to go from plain text to pdf.

userbinator• 9 years ago

Accents and other symbols cannot be printed

I wonder what sort of systems they're using. Even ISO-8859-1/Windows-1252 has accented characters.

If you do not enter the friend's names, they will appear in the Personalized SpiderMan Book as 'none'.

That immediately reminds me of https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/

Hopefully the OP's service will be more robust than this.

rhythmvs11• 9 years ago

Hi, OP here! Multilingual support is core and center of our development. We do a lot more than accents, and go great lengths to make all of our stack, Unicode-based. That means ES6 regexes, up to designing and developing our own fonts. If that interests you, then have a look at http://dodecaglotta.com, too, a side project of mine, where I use that font and show how mad we are with language support…

edent• 9 years ago

That's absolutely lovely! And the site works really well on mobile. Kudos!

phaemon• 9 years ago

I think I've spotted a flaw in this cunning plan:

"For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Sam."

Doesn't really work.

Wait, clearly I've chosen the wrong name. I can fix this!

"For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Frododo."

Perfect!

cableshaft2• 9 years ago

You're on the right track. Other options:

Leonardo. Giancarlo. Fernando. Emilio. Alonzo. Ezio. Jethro. Galileo. DeNiro. Neo.

GoodMalts• 9 years ago

Well, almost. To properly fit in the meter it would have to be three syllables with stress on the first syllable (and last, but that will mostly take care of itself). So Ezio works, but none of the others fit when spoken 'naturally'. Jethro could if you say "Jeth(er)o". Alonzo would if you say it like "Elon-zo".

jotux• 9 years ago

Speak for yourself

"For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Joe."

Katrijnvb• 9 years ago

Wow, I would love to read a classic with a twist. Whimsical, and most of all, it looks gorgeous. Great gift!

brohee2• 9 years ago

The typography of the web page looks all wonky on FF/Windows, with the text being blurry and wavy...

Puts me off going further.

rhythmvs11• 9 years ago

We have tested cross-browser behavior on most common platform combo’s. Which version of Windows + Firefox are you on? Care to tell what you see more specifically? I know there’s still an unresolved issue with the <picture> element on browsers which don’t support it natively, but the typography (the typeset text that is) should be all fine, is it not?

brohee2• 9 years ago

Here's a screenshot : https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2P8VW0o_NjORlNMczdCUEpnQn...

That's FF51/Windows 7 32 bits (thrashy corporate laptop)

ChicagoBoy11• 9 years ago

This looks stunning.

Not that it really matters, but without sanitation of the name input fields I was able to put in some html to really make the rendered text quite wonky.

Stunning project!

rhythmvs11• 9 years ago

Happy to hear you love our work! You’re right: we don’t html-sanitize user input in the form, so one can indeed do some colorful hacks and put in some easter eggs.

    <i style='color:pink;font-family: cursive;'>Darcy</i>

Though I don’t expect people to purchase such a funky copy, one can have some fun allright. But thanks for noticing anyway!

pbhjpbhj• 9 years ago

I take it the spiel on that page wasn't written by a native speaker? The flow seems very strange. Don't get me wrong, it's excellent English on the whole, just a bit weird.

In part it reads like the page was written to sell a publishing platform and then modified to sell search-and-replaced names in books.

Personally I can't see a market for it at all; yet there seems to be several gushing positive comments here (maybe a bit too positive, it looks suspicious, but perhaps I'm just not the target).

Has anyone really ever thought "oh I wish my name was in P&P instead of Mr Darcy"?

Mind you I find the children's version of this saccharin too; bowdlerising a classic just seems to make it even worse.

magic_beans2• 9 years ago

Am I the only one here who finds this to be a ridiculous idea? The joy of reading doesn't exactly come from seeing your own name replacing Jane Eyre's.

Sewdn• 9 years ago

The idea is to illustrate the power of iterative typesetting in combination with Printing on Demand. I can understand you don't like the idea of seeing yourself show up in every story, but you must like the idea that any manuscript out there, can be automatically designed and typeset and even iteratively be redacted or translated and forked into new editions...

magic_beans2• 9 years ago

THAT is, in fact, very interesting. I'm not sure why you lead with the personalization factor on HN.

purple-again• 9 years ago

Yeah I'm not very interested in the idea but the tech that is drivng it is super fascinating. Somewhere else in this thread the (owner?) mentioned this was a step on the road towards automated drag and drop publishing which would be AMAZING if they get it right.

As a passionate writer that knows he's not good the current gauntlet to self publishing turned me away despite the fact that I would willing pay $500 in a heartbeat to have a copy of one of my stories on my bookshelf.

rhythmvs11• 9 years ago

That’s exactly what we are building. And self-publishing authors are at the center of our focus.

I hope we will indeed ‘get it right’. I can tell you, it’s not something so trivial as ‘put a fancy GUI on top of LaTeX’. Instead, we are developing a complete typographic design engine, which involves natural language processing, file normalizations, drama parsing, complicated algorithms for type fitting, sectioning, page count quiring, color space conversions, Unicode common locale, multilingual hyphenation, opentype feature development, etc., etc.

12 meters of typographic literature are backing us, while we spend countless late nights in front of our code editor. My printing experience with my Original Heidelberg letterpresses in my garage puts some extra weight on the scale — I just love letters and books, the whole lot of typographic history!

It might assure you, if I tell you I am also methodically working my way through the Chicago Manual of Style, turning those prescriptive rules into working software.

So, do subscribe to our waiting list, and expect your invite coming soon: http://textus.io!

Insanity• 9 years ago

This is a great idea, absolutely love it! It's a great gift for couples who like to read thought I would not just personalize any classic and read it that way. As an avid reader, this is something that I really want in my collection of books.

I'm sure I'll make my wife happy with this personalized Romeo and Julliet as well. Though I think I might be more excited for it than her :D

pavel_lishin• 9 years ago

Imagine you and your sweetheart starring in the greatest love stories of all time: personalize Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

It's not a great love story, it's a cautionary tale of how reckless teenagers who are too quick to jump to conclusions.

rhythmvs11• 9 years ago

That’s why we also have Pride and Prejudice on offer ;-) And soon enough, you’ll be able to write your very own greatest love story, and have it typeset and published with our typographic design engine. As You Like It :-p

Show HN: Personalize Romeo and Juliet or Pride and Prejudice

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