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Analysing Vellum and Ink

This is a bit of tomfoolery, about which you can read more if the fancy takes you.

The outcome of this project will be annotated editions of Vellum and Ink. But there's a problem: we don't have rights to reproduce those texts! Never fear, we have a clever (?) workaround.

If you own an electronic copy of Vellum (and eventually Ink, I hope), you can add our annotations (if everything works as it should) by running it through a little Python program. You'll need to spend some time on the commandline; I hope the instructions are comprehensive, but so far I've only tested them on one (1) machine with one (1) edition of Vellum so Your Mileage May Vary.

For completeness sake: these instructions have been verified to work

  • on a Macbook pro with Python 2.7, working with the Amazon ebook edition of Vellum, listed as published by Tor, “Unabridged edition (August 11, 2011)”.
  • ... nowhere else, actually.

Here goes:

  1. You need to extract the raw html from the ebook edition you've got. A good option is Calibre. If your edition is DRM-locked, some Calibre extensions can help. Note that it is entirely your responsibility to ensure that this is legal in your jurisdiction.

  2. Get the html into one file. Any way you like. A Calibre export to “htmlz” format worked quite nicely for me: this is a zip archive, and the file you want inside it is index.html.

  3. Now check out this very repository (the instructions are for a linux/unix/mac commandline, I have no idea how this would look for Windows):

     $ git clone https://github.com/tikitu/vellum_and_ink.git

  4. Go into the directory this gives you and install the Python tools. (If you don't have virtualenv yet, start by installing that: pip install virtualenv. If you don't have pip, get that first. I know, I'm sorry, Python packaging is a mess.) Right, where were we?

     $ cd vellum_and_ink
 $ virtualenv .
 $ bin/python setup.py install

  5. Now you've got a tool that (if all goes well) will reformat your ebook to add in our annotations:

     $ bin/vellum <ebook-html-file> <output-filename>

If you see any commandline output, it means this process has gone wrong somewhere. Email me the details and I'll see if I can help.

For the styling of the resulting file to work properly it needs to stay in the same directory as your git clone (i.e. vellum_and_ink). (It will look for some css files in a directory called resources; if it doesn't find them, no styling.) If it's already there, opening the output file in your web browser should (fingers crossed) show you Vellum in funny pastel colours.