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Regarding the © symbol in colophons and copyright notices for vertical writing in Denden Converter

2025年1月23日 17:18

This is an article about Kindle publishing. I noticed two things when creating a colophon for an e-book using the vertical writing feature of Denden Converter. These are minor tips, but I will share them here for reference.

When using the © symbol for a copyright notice in a vertical colophon, it does not rotate 90 degrees clockwise like English letters or the @ symbol in emails.
If you want to include the colophon in the table of contents, but want the first line of the colophon page to be the "e-book title" instead of "Colophon," how should you do it?

Solution 1 -- Copyright --

The © symbol for copyright notices

In the vertical writing mode of Denden Converter, English characters entered in half-width are rotated 90 degrees clockwise by default. The at-mark @ symbol in emails also rotates 90 degrees clockwise in the same way. However, in the case of the © symbol for copyright notices, it does not rotate 90 degrees clockwise as shown in the image above.
The original text data for the image above (using Denden Markdown notation) looks like this.

## Colophon
First edition published February 1, 2025
Author: Taro Yamada
© 2025 Yamada Taro

※By the way, to represent special characters or symbols like the © symbol in HTML, there are two types of dedicated character codes: "character entity references" and "numeric character references." However, in the case of the © symbol,
writing it as © (character entity reference) results in an error.It seems it is not supported in Denden Markdown. Please make sure to usethe © (numeric character reference) instead.

Now, here is the solution. If you write the text data as shown below, the © symbol will rotate 90 degrees clockwise.

## Colophon
First edition published February 1, 2025
Author: Taro Yamada
<span class="sideways">©</span> 2025 Yamada Taro

No CSS description is required. This is because the sideways class selector is already defined in the default_vertical.css for vertical writing. You can download default_vertical.css from the following link.
https://conv.denshochan.com/downloads

Let's check the contents of the stylesheet just in case. Open default_vertical.css in your text editor and search for "sideways." If you see the following description, you are good to go.

.sideways {
  -epub-text-orientation: sideways;
}

Some people might want to assign an arbitrary name to the class and manage it themselves. I will write down that method just in case. Suppose you assign, for example, the name "copyright" to the class attribute of the span element in the text data as follows.

## Colophon
First edition published February 1, 2025
Author: Taro Yamada
<span class="copyright">©</span> 2025 Yamada Taro

Then, add the following code to the end of the default_vertical.css file you downloaded earlier for verification, and upload it along with your text data.

.copyright {
  -epub-text-orientation: sideways;
}

I believe this method will also cause the © symbol to rotate 90 degrees clockwise.
[Update] 2025/01/27
The advantage of doing it this way is that it expands the range of customization.
For example, if you want to make the size of the © symbol slightly larger or smaller, you can change it using the font-size property.
Also, if you decide you want to keep it in the vertical orientation, you can change the value of the text-orientation property from "sideways" back to the initial value of "mixed." This way, you can easily make adjustments just by tweaking the CSS.

.copyright {
  /* 記号サイズの変更 */
  font-size: 1.2em;
  /* 縦書きの向きに戻したい（初期値に戻す） */
  -epub-text-orientation: mixed;
}

Alternatives to the © symbol and other methods

I have written quite a bit, but there is a simpler way to write it using only text data without using CSS. If you enter "(c)" in half-width, it will rotate 90 degrees clockwise just like other English letters. Also, there is a method where you replace the text directly below the symbol with Japanese as shown in the image below without changing the orientation of the © symbol. If you find it troublesome, I think that is sufficient.

Solution 2 -- Table of Contents and Colophon --

Next, we will include the colophon item at the end of the table of contents so that clicking or tapping it will jump to the colophon page. Here is how to make the first line of the colophon page the e-book title.
First, set up the text data as follows.

## Colophon
First Edition Published February 1, 2025
Author: Taro Yamada
<span class="copyright">©</span> 2025 Yamada Taro

Then, ensure this colophon page is the final text file.
For example, if you have text data from 01.txt, 02.txt, ... up to 10.txt, make the colophon text file 11.txt. Alternatively, in Denden Markdown, ===== (three or more half-width equal signs with empty lines before and after) represents a page break (file split), so you can also add ===== to the end of 10.txt and write the colophon content there.
Note: If you name files 1.txt, 2.txt, 3.txt, ... 11.txt without adding a 0 to the beginning, the order of file concatenation will be 1.txt, 10.txt, 11.txt, 2.txt, 3.txt, ... 9.txt, so please be careful.

Decomposing an epub file in e-book format

Now, here is how to change the first line of the colophon page from "Colophon" to the "E-book Title." You need to convert the text data into an epub e-book file using Denden Converter once, then decompose and edit it.

On Windows 10/11, you can decompose an epub file using only standard features without any free software. Simply compress the epub file into a zip, extract it (extract all), edit it, and then compress it back into a zip, rename it, and return it to an epub file. (It sounds difficult when put into words, but it is easy once you get used to it.)

Workflow (Example: Windows 11)

Rename the xxxx.epub file to, for example, mybook.zip
(A warning dialog will appear, but select "Yes")
Right-click and select "Extract All..." -> "Extract" -> "mybook folder generated" (The META-INF folder, OEBPS folder, and mimetype file will be created inside the mybook folder) -> Begin editing
Select all three: the META-INF folder, OEBPS folder, and mimetype file, right-click, and select "Compress to..." -> "ZIP file" -> "Rename the file back to mybook.epub"

Note: If the above method does not work, please use free software.

Editing the xhtml file

It is very simple. You should see a folder named OEBPS inside the decomposed folder. Inside that, there should be files named bodymatter_x_x.xhtml (where x is a half-width number). Please open the last file among them.

<body class="bodymatter vrtl" epub:type="bodymatter">
<h2 id="toc_index_1">奥付</h2>

<p>二〇二五年二月一日　初版発行<br/>
著者　山田太郎<br/>
<span class="sideways">©</span> 2025 Yamada Taro</p>
</body>

In the code above, simply replace <h2 id="toc_index_1">Colophon</h2> with Colophon with E-book Title . (Please do not delete the h2 tag.)
Even if you change the text inside the h2 tag, the table of contents link will remain active. After that, follow the workflow steps above to return it to the original mybook.epub.

If you find this troublesome, you can also add an afterword to the table of contents and write the colophon content together after the afterword description.

Finally

The aforementioned sideways class is explained on the following page.
(Table of Contents 17. HTML Helper Classes)
https://conv.denshochan.com/markdown
In addition to the sideways class, the tcy class (vertical-in-horizontal) and upright class (upright) are also already defined. Like the sideways class, you can set the orientation of vertical text without needing CSS descriptions. However, please note that at present, the upright class is also set to the same vertical-in-horizontal as the tcy class.

default_vertical.css

.tcy {
  -epub-text-combine: horizontal;
}

.upright {
  /* -epub-text-orientation: upright; */
  -epub-text-combine: horizontal;
}

That is all.
I hope your Kindle books sell like crazy! (lol)