
Show HN: Personalize Romeo and Juliet or Pride and Prejudice - rhythmvs
http://www.textusclassics.com/
======
phaemon
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!

~~~
cableshaft
You're on the right track. Other options:

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

~~~
GoodMalts
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".

~~~
rhythmvs
I guess we should take a better look at something like
[http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Poem/](http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Poem/)
or [http://rhymeless.hamiltonulmer.com](http://rhymeless.hamiltonulmer.com)
and implement some rhyming name generator to add to our app :-)

Just kidding, of course. But that’s why I love HN so much: you show ’em
something and they start brainstorming on a side track of intellectual
creativity. Thank you so much, guys, for all the hearty feedback on our app!

------
nitemice
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...](http://www.simplypersonalized.com/product/personalized-spiderman-
book/)

~~~
userbinator
_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/](https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/)

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

~~~
rhythmvs
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](http://dodecaglotta.com), too, a side project of
mine, where I use that font and show how mad we are with language support…

~~~
jamesdwilson
My name is James and your site does not seem to respect the ends with s
possessive rule. (James'). Thoughts on a fix?

~~~
Asooka
That's because the "ends with s" possessive rule only applies for plurals. The
correct possessive of James is "James's"

~~~
rhythmvs
You mean you expected “James’ faithful wife” but got “James’s faithful wife”
instead?

We could implement it your way, but since – as far as I know – grammar rules*
diverge (allowing both orthographies), we opted for the uniform application of
the possessive /’s/, which was easier to implement, too. What do you think:
should we vary between books, based on the idiom of the original text, or
should it be a user preference?

(*)
[http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/apostro.asp](http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/apostro.asp)

~~~
Asooka
Well if you ask me _personally_ , it should be "James's" and anyone who
disagrees fails English class in school. Of course, I don't make the rules; in
fact no one person does and that's the problem here. I doubt there is a big
enough number of people who care to customise such a fine detail, so for your
product I would just use the rules obeyed in the original text. Or if you
don't want to customise on a per-text basis, the rule used by the majority of
texts. Or just the easier one, since it's technically correct.

~~~
rhythmvs
Thanks for the feedback! I agree with you. So, we’ll stick to the orthography
of the original text (which in these two cases, Shakespeare and Austen,
already were obeying to the majority rule of `’s` instead of `’`).

In our generic product, though, users will be able to select and apply their
preferences for _orthotypography_ , i.e. such things like single or double
quotes (Oxford vs Chicago, British vs American). But when it comes to spelling
per se, we will leave it up to the user to go with the ‘correct’ form of
English of their liking, and leave the input text untouched.

------
pavel_lishin
> _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.

~~~
rhythmvs
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

------
ChicagoBoy11
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!

~~~
rhythmvs
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!

------
Insanity
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

------
pbhjpbhj
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.

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

Puts me off going further.

~~~
rhythmvs
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?

~~~
brohee
Here's a screenshot :
[https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2P8VW0o_NjORlNMczdCUEpnQn...](https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2P8VW0o_NjORlNMczdCUEpnQnc)

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

~~~
rhythmvs
Thanks! That’s helpful, indeed. Though, judging from the screenshot, it’s an
issue with our fonts, which have not been optimally hinted (yet), because, in
the days of retina displays, hinting only still matters for… trashy corporate
laptops with OS’s that don’t properly support subpixel anti-aliasing and which
rely on a font’s built-in rasterizing ‘hints’.

So, thanks again for letting us know, so we put more careful font hinting
higher up on our todo. Meanwhile, I hope you’d want to give TextusClassics.com
a second chance, using another machine.

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

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

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

