How To Expand Text in Speech Bubbles With KF8

Most comic book and illustrated childrens’ book creators write for a relatively large printed page and not for the hand-held screen. Small details and text that are easily visible on 7×10 or 8.5×11 inch paper can shrink beyond recognition on the 600×1024 px screen of a hand-held Kindle device such as the Fire. Comic book and childrens’ book creators are some of today’s most incredible artists. Many of these talented graphic novel illustrators draw their works on 17 x 11 inch paper. Lots of childrens’ book illustrators actually paint on big canvasses and then take pictures.

Instead of redrawing the entire book for the small screen, there are several great alternatives that make it possible for a Kindle viewer to expand parts of an image such as speech bubbles by just tapping on them.

These techniques utilize Kindle’s new KF8 formatting. They work on all hand-held Kindles and also on Kindle for PC. They are as follows:

1)      Panel magnification – A viewer taps on a single panel of a multi-panel image. That panel expands and the rest of the image is greyed out. This technique is known as panel magnification with a lightbox. My most recent blog article covers in detail how to create the KF8 code for this effect. Here is a link to that article:

http://blog.epubandebookhelp.com/2012/05/16/kf8-panel-magnification/

Here is how KF8 panel magnification with a lightbox looks in action:

KF8 Panel Magnification Before Before Activation

To expand the top frame, click on it and here is the result:

KF8 Panel Magnification After Activation

2)      Covering a speech bubble with a larger, filled frame containing expanded text – The speech bubble is still there, but is no longer visible because larger text inside a filled border is been placed on top of it. The viewer simply taps on the speech bubble to activate the visibility of thelarger text, which was invisible until then. This blog article will show how to write the KF8 code to create this effect, which is shown as follows:

KF8 Speech Bubble Text Expansion Before Activation

Just tap on the speech bubble and the following text surrounded by a filled border appears on top of the speech bubble and covers it up completely:

KF8 Speech Bubble Text Expansion After Activation

3)      Swapping text with different text – This effect enables a viewer to tap on a screen and swap one set of text with a new set of text that can have totally different formatting and screen position.  This KF8 effect makes the initial text invisible and makes the new text visible. This blog article will also show how to write the KF8 code to achieve this effect, which is shown below:

KF8 Text Swapping Before Activation

A quick tap on “This is the original text” produces the following result:

KF8 Text Swapping After Activation

This blog article will show in detail how to write the code for KF8 effects numbers 2 and 3 above.

General Explanation of Replacing Speech Bubbles or Text With Larger Text

1)      A Tap Target is created. The Tap Target is a region on the viewing screen that the viewer taps (in hand-held Kindles) or clicks (in Kindle for PC) to activate the text swap. The Tap Target is a container that either provides the location of the speech bubble within the image or actually contains the initial text that will be swapped out.

2)      A Parent Container is created. The Parent Container is also a container that holds the text that will cover up the contents of the Tap Target, whether that is a speech bubble or just regular text. The Parent Container is configured to be invisible because its CSS attribute “display” is set to “none.” The KF8 effect makes the Parent Container and its contents visible. This effect either covers up what was under the Tap Target (in the case of a speech bubble) or replaces the contents of the Tap Target container (in the case of a text swap).

3)      Next we use KindleGen to convert the .epub file to .mobi. KindleGen has to be used to create any .mobi file that employs KF8 formatting. KindleGen can be downloaded from Amazon and currently runs only from the command prompt on your computer.

4)      Finally we are ready to view the .mobi file in a real Kindle e-reader. The Kindle Previewer isn’t capable of performing KF8 effects such as panel magnification or text swapping. You’ll need to load the .mobi file on an actual Kindle e-reader such as Kindle for PC or the Kindle Fire to view the KF8 effects in action. A regular ol’ Kindle will work just fine as well.

To load the .mobi file on your Kindle For PC, just paste the .mobi file into your My Kindle Content directory, which will be located in your My Documents directory. The My Kindle Contents directory is created when Kindle for PC is installed on your PC. When you open up Kindle For PC, you’ll see the new .mobi file sitting on the bookshelf.

To load the .mobi file into a Kindle hand-held device such as a Fire, connect the device to your computer with a USB cable. The Kindle will appear as another directory in your computer. Paste the new .mobi file into the Books directory of this Kindle device. When you go back into your Kindle, you’ll find the new .mobi file sitting on the bookshelf of the Docs directory, not the Books directory.

5)      Once the viewer has opened up the .mobi file in their Kindle, the viewer can click (in Kindle for PC) or tap (in a hand-held Kindle) on the Tap Target to activate the swap. The KF8 coding that will be shown here controls that swap. The contents of the Parent Container are made visible and brought to the top. The contents of the Parent Container either cover up what is under the Tap Target (in the case of a speech bubble) or replace what was in the Tap Target (in the case of swapping text).

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Before I present the HTML and CSS for this effect, let me provide some tips to make it easy to edit an .epub file. Keep in mind that you do all of the editing to an .epub file. The very last step is to convert the .epub file to a .mobi file and then load it into the Kindle e-reader. You never do any editing directly to a .mobi file.

I usually start building my .epub files from scratch by opening up a brand-new blank .epub file in the free epub editor Sigil. First I create and name all of the blank HTML and CSS pages that I’ll be pasting content into.

In this case, it only necessary to create a single, blank HTML page in the Text directory and name it SwapText.xhtml and a single, blank CSS page named SwapText.css in the Styles directory. The Text and Styles directories are default directories that appear in a new, blank epub file created in Sigil.

Following that, while you still have Sigil open, insert the 600×1024 image shown below into the default Images directory of the brand-new .epub file. This image should be named TextSwap.jpg.

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TextSwap.jpg – Drawn By Fantastic Comic Book Artist Kris Aquino in His Comic Book Series “Dimensions” That I’m Preparing For Upload To Amazon Kindle At The Time Of This Writing

I then add some basic meta data such as author name and book title to the file while it is still open in Sigil. I now save the file and close Sigil. Sigil will save the file as an .epub file. The filename that you save this .epub file will not be the ebook’s name when you see it on the book shelf of your Kindle e-reader. The ebook’s name as it will appear when on the book shelf is set as a meta tag in the .epub’s content.opf file. You can directly edit the content.opf file as explained later or simply use Sigil’s Meta Tools to set this title along with the author’s name.

You’ll want to do all of your editing to this .epub file using a free text-editing program such as Notepad , or something similar which has numbered lines and search/replace functions. If you have a Mac, you’ll want to  use a free program called TextWrangler instead of Notepad . Don’t use Windows Notepad as it doesn’t have the numbered-lines feature. Some of the files you’ll be editing here will looks like a dog’s breakfast if you open them up in Windows Notepad.

I recommend using Notepad   and not Sigil to edit the HTML, especially in this case. I noticed that Sigil would do funny things to the JSON object (discussed below) that I had to undo every time I opened the .epub file up in Sigil. This didn’t happen with Notepad .

I can now work the epub’s component files directly by changing the .epub extension to .zip and then opening this .zip file with WinZip. Once you have unzipped the .zip file,  use the free text editor Notepad to edit all of the component files inside the .zip file from here on out.

Now we’re ready to edit.

With that, let’s get right into it. I’ve placed both effects on the same page of the .epub/.mobi file so that all of the HTML and all of the CSS for both effects will be seen on a single .xhtml page and a single .css page. Initially I will present all of that HTML and all of that CSS for both effects.

I will then separate the effects and show how the HTML and CSS interact to create each of the two effects individually.

I will also show what lines of code have to be added to the .epub’s content.opf file to enable KF8 effects on your Kindle devices.

First, let’s start with the combined HTML for both effects. Here it is:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN”   “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtm...  

 

<!—Configuring overall screen and image size for both KF8 effects –>

<!– Defines page size (600 X 1024) and contains everything –>  

   

<!– Defines image size (600 X 1024) and positioning – absolute –>

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