Einstein's
"Relativity" book in PDF format
Relativity.pdf is
a "port" of an old project from the 1990's, which originally converted
Einstein's relativity book into a hypertext file, in Windows "HelpFile"
format (relativ.hlp). It's now been converted to Adobe's portable
document format (".PDF")
Project
progress:
- v
0.9
book completed. Converted remaining equations from "Times" to
"Arial".
- v
0.91 added new subject index
- v
0.92
added index of people mentioned in the book,
with brief biographical details
- v1.1
added summaries for each chapter to the table of contents
- v1.2
added a picture of Einstein
Right
now, the hyperlinks embedded within the book aren't
compiling properly, but you can navigate within the separate
bookmarks pane on the left, which has all the chapters and sections
listed. To jump to the occurrence of a particular word, you
can hit "Ctrl
F" to trigger Acrobat's "Find" function, and then F3
to page through all instances of that word in the
text.
Some of the
"look and feel" of the .pdf file has been inherited from the "helpfile"
version -- text is still in a "sans serif" font to make it easier to
read onscreen, italicised text is picked out in dark
red, names of
people appear in dark blue. Some of the design decisions made for the
helpfile version don't transfer so well to .pdf, so I'll be trying to
set aside time to do a bit
more tweeking, but the basic idea is the same: that the content should
be made as accessible as possible, even if that means
straying from the usual conventions of book typesetting. The
book is meant to be read, searched and referred to,
rather than
looked
at.
The original
"helpfile" version
Relativ.hlp
used to be available from the old "Erk's
Relativity
Pages"
website, and had multiple tiled panes that allowed diferent
views
of the document. It also had a few nice features that aren't
implemented on the PDF version, such as the ability to see chapter
names and footnote text when you hovered the mouse over a hyperlink.
The helpfile version allowed text to re-flow when a window was resized,
and it was designed to be readable on small monitors.
It
was a pretty thorough implementation. The only real outstanding issue
with the final version was that, due to a character-coding error, any
time the
user copied sections to the clipboard, the implementation copyright
notice displayed an (R) symbol rather than the proper "©".
The
original Windows help engine had a few restrictions (for instance, you
only had the 16-colour Windows system palette to play with), but it
also had some pretty advanced features that most helpfile
authors didn't use, and relativ.hlp did a good job of
showing off what the format was capable of.
|