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.
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.
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.
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!
"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!
Leonardo. Giancarlo. Fernando. Emilio. Alonzo. Ezio. Jethro. Galileo. DeNiro. Neo.
"For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Joe."
Puts me off going further.
That's FF51/Windows 7 32 bits (thrashy corporate laptop)
It's not a great love story, it's a cautionary tale of how reckless teenagers who are too quick to jump to conclusions.
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!
<i style='color:pink;font-family: cursive;'>Darcy</i>
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
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.