Brighthelmstone, or Brighton, in Sussex, is 54 miles from London.​—​It was, like Amsterdam, a miserable-fishing town, but is now a place of importance, to which it was raised by the countenance and bounty of the Prince of Wales. The houses are, generally speaking, more inconvenient than unhandsome; and the streets are narrow and irregular. In the year 1699, more than 100 huts were swallowed by the sea; and in a few years more, all the tenements on the Cliffs will be similarly devoured, unless a very formidable embankment is erected to resist that imperious element.

It is one of those numerous watering-places which beskirt this polluted island, and operate as apologies for idleness, sensuality, and nearly all the ramifications of social imposture: where the barren seek a stimulus for fecundity; the voluptuary to wash the cobwebs from the interstices of his flaccid anatomy; and the swag-bellied denizen, the rancid adhesion of old cheese, Irish butter, junk, assa-fœtida, tallow, mundungus, and train-oil.

There are two taverns, namely, the Castle and the Old Ship, where the richer visitors resort; and at each of these houses a weekly assembly is held, where a master of the ceremonies attends, to arrange the parties, not according to the scale of utility, but that of aristocracy.

There is a ball every Monday at the Castle, and on Thursdays at the Old Ship: every subscriber pays three shillings and sixpence, and every non-subscriber five shillings; for which they are entitled to a beverage which they call tea and coffee.

The masters of the respective inns receive the profits, except on those nights appointed for the benefit of the master of the ceremonies; to whom all, who wish to be arranged as people of distinction, subscribe one guinea​—​and who would not purchase distinction at so cheap a rate? Independently of this vain douceur, this must pay most liberally for their tickets! The card assemblies are on Wednesdays and Fridays.

There is an hotel, which was intended as a country Hummums, or grand dormitory; but, in my weak opinion, the establishment is somewhat inefficient, unless it can be supposed that the tumultuous equipment of stage-coaches, at the dawn of day, is contributory to the purposes of rest.

There is a theatre, commodious, and generally well directed; the nights of performance are Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. At the lower end of North-street is a sort of Birmingham Vauxhall, called the Promenade Grove: it is a small inclosure of a paddock, tormented from its native simplicity, befringed with a few gawkey poplars, and decorated with flowers, bowers, benches, frogs, ground-ivy, a ditch, and a wooden box for the minstrels.

The coast is like the greater part of its visitors, bold, saucy, intrusive, and dangerous.

The bathing-machines, even for the ladies, have no awning of covering, as at Weymouth, Margate, and Scarborough; consequently they are all severely inspected by the aid of telescopes, not only as they confusedly ascend from the sea, but as they kick and sprawl and flounder about its muddy margin, like so many mad Naiads in flannel smocks:​—​the shore is so disastrously imperfect, that those beginners who paddle in, are injured by the shocking repulsion of the juices to the brain; and of those who are enabled to plunge in, and swim beyond the surge, it is somewhat less than an even bet that many never return​—​in truth, the loss of lives here every season, would make any society miserable, who were not congregating in the mart of noisy folly.

There is a Subscription House, or Temple of Fortune, on the Steyne, where the minor part of our blessed nobility are accustomed to reduce their characters and their estates in the same period;​—​the signal for admittance is habeo​—​for rejection, debeo.

There are lodgings of all descriptions and fitness, from twenty pounds per week on the Cliffs, to half a crown per night in a stable; and the sinews of morality are so happily relaxed, that a bawd and a baroness may snore in the same tenement;​—​the keepers of the lodging-houses, like the keepers of mad-houses, having but one common point in view​—​to bleed the parties sufficiently.

There are carriages and caravans of all shapes and dimensions, from a waggon to a fish-cart; in which you may move like a king, a criminal, or a crab, that is, forwards, backwards, or laterally.

There are two libraries on the Steyne, replete with every flimsy species of novels, involving the prodigious intrigues of an imaginary society: this kind of recreation is termed light reading; perhaps from the certain effect it has upon the brains of my young countrywomen, of making them light-headed!

There is a parish church, where the canaille go to pray; but as that is on a hill, and the gentry found their sabbath visit to the Almighty very troublesome, the amiable and accommodating master priest has consigned the care of his common parish mutton to his journeyman, the curate, and has kindly raised a Chapel Royal for the lambs of fashion, where a certain sum is paid for every seat: and this, it must be admitted, is as it should be; as a well-bred Deity will assuredly be more attentive to a reclining Dutchess, parrying the assaults of the devil behind her fan, than the vulgar piety of a plebeian on his knees.

There were books open in the circulating libraries, where you were requested to contribute your mite of charity to the support of the rector, as his income is somewhat less than seven hundred pounds a year; the last incumbent died worth thirty thousand pounds. During the first dawnings of convalescence after the suspension of the King’s intellectual faculties, he asked Dr. Willis how much he netted by his Lincolnshire pluralities​—​“Eight hundred per year,” was the reply.​—​“Then why,” added the monarch, “do you, who are so rich, undertake to cure mad people for hire?”​—​“I imitate Jesus Christ, sire, who went about doing good.”​—​“Yes; but,” rejoined his Majesty, “in the first place, Jesus Christ did good for nothing; and in the second, he had not eight hundred a year, my friend!”

The full work is available at the Internet Archive.

The markup that produced the third line of that image was this:

<p width="0">Same bug with <i>italic</i>&#x200c;,
<b>bold</b>&#x200c; or
<span>spans</span>&#x200c;</p>

Do you see repeated words in the markup? No, me neither. Putting a ZWNJ (U+200C) character straight after the end of another element will cause the final word of that element to be repeated.

In practice, this is easily avoided. If you don’t put a ZWNJ before an em dash where that em dash comes directly after some styled element (e.g. bold, italic or text size change), you won’t hit this bug and all you lose is one extra line-break point.

If you weren’t using any ZWNJ characters around em dashes, you’d have fewer line breaks anyway, so nothing is lost.

In practice, as I’ve said before, I put zero width spaces around em dashes, and only change those into zero width non joiners for the Kindle’s benefit, with a script. That script also searches for places where the ZWNJ will trigger the Kindle bug and removes them, so I don’t have to think about this bug when I’m marking up a text.

However, this morning when I ran it, it auto-updated to the latest version, and that crashes. Auto updating is bad enough when you know you have a set of software that works exactly as you like, but updating to a version that won’t run is just bloody rude.

I bet that there’s a cute SELinux trick that could be used to stop Kindle Previewer having network access, but a simple stop-gap is to reinstall the old version, go to the directory where you installed it, and prevent autoupdate.jar from being used. In my case, that’s these two lines:

 $ cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/kindle\ previewer
 $ chmod 0 autoupdate.jar

Kindle Previewer now moans that it can’t access that jar file when it runs (duh), but pressing “OK” allows the rest of it to run just fine. I’ll investigate more when I decide I want to see how things look on the Kindle Fire, and that’s not going to be until they’re available in the UK.

If you attempt to insert them between two words without any spaces, the Kindle will stubbornly keep both words together when breaking lines. A simple way of getting round this would be to use a spaced en dash instead, as Jaye Manus suggests, but can we do any better?

The Unicode-compliant method of hinting that a line break can occur without a visible space is to put U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE either side of the dash, but the Kindle doesn’t recognise this character. However, it does recognise U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER, and appears to treat that in exactly the way that ZWSP should be treated.

So, I would mark up the first em dash in Jaye’s example sentence: “I think he’s the best–and I use that loosely–so will let him live.” as

...the best‌—‌and I use...

in the XHTML that I submit to Kindlegen.

With the U+200C ZWNJ included, the Kindle allows line breaking around the dash, and will even insert some space around the dash if necessary to justify the line. Dictionary lookups will also work exactly as you’d expect.

If you were sure that you always wanted a possible break point on both sides of your em dashes, you could just run a search and replace after marking up your document, but you may want to avoid breaks before a trailing dash at the end of a paragraph, for example.

The only further wrinkle here (for me) is that ZWNJ is the wrong character if you’re trying to maintain a ‘clean’ master XHTML file for EPUB conversion or as a web page, so I actually mark up the document with ZWSP and make the ZWSP-to-ZWNJ conversion part of the set that I do before running Kindlegen.

I’m sure he won’t mind if I tell you that the email was from someone who has worked on a ton of retro tech fonts himself.

The email started with a compliment, which is always nice, and then continued by saying that he’d downloaded the FX-80 manual and found that the bottom row of my lowercase “g” was out by half a pixel.

I nearly fell off my chair laughing, because that’s exactly what I would do!