Hi...

Just a minor warning, but the 4 or 5 millimeter inset screen on the PRS900 kind of stinks because the first line of text on a page is always in shadow unless the light is absolutely perfect.

I always have to wiggle the reader at the top of a page just so I can read the text since I like an angle to read, which works fine for most of the page...

EDIT: Just to add, I only am downloading books from Sony's service, so can't comment on other books. Ironically, I'd expect the Sony Reader books to be *better* since I pay for them.

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Do you have ebooks which are formatted without a top margin? Or is the shadow really that big?

Do you have ebooks which are formatted without a top margin? Or is the shadow really that big?

A lot of the ePub I downloaded from MR was without a top margin when displayed in my Gen3. Good that it is also a problem for PRS-900. Maybe that will get people to care about top margin.

Do you have ebooks which are formatted without a top margin? Or is the shadow really that big?

Seems like most of them are coming through with no top margin. Certainly my older books that were probably converted a long time ago.

Also, find it annoying that the "margin mode" doesn't do anything for these books. They looked fine on my 700... but that could have been pre-ePub format I guess.

A lot of the ePub I downloaded from MR was without a top margin when displayed in my Gen3. Good that it is also a problem for PRS-900. Maybe that will get people to care about top margin.
I use at least a little top margin in all my ebook uploads because i don't like it when the first line starts to closely spaced to the top of the screen. Btw. did you inform the uploaders of those ebooks about that? I'm sure most of them would consider adding a top margin...

Seems like most of them are coming through with no top margin. Certainly my older books that were probably converted a long time ago.

Also, find it annoying that the "margin mode" doesn't do anything for these books. They looked fine on my 700... but that could have been pre-ePub format I guess.
Could you try some other ePubs please? I would like to eliminate all doubt that it's a general problem with the PRS-900.

I use at least a little top margin in all my ebook uploads because i don't like it when the first line starts to closely spaced to the top of the screen. Btw. did you inform the uploaders of those ebooks about that? I'm sure most of them would consider adding a top margin...

I am trying to figure out what causes the problem since there are some book without a @page specification that works OK and some do not.
All the HarryT's Dickens book I tested worked OK for example.

Could you try some other ePubs please? I would like to eliminate all doubt that it's a general problem with the PRS-900.

Will do... if someone can give me a link or a "good" book that I can download, i'll try it right now.

tx

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phazlehurst, please let Sony knows there's a problem. They can't fix it if none is reporting it. I plan to order a PRS-900 tomorrow.

Will do... if someone can give me a link or a "good" book that I can download, i'll try it right now.

tx

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You can try it with one of HarryT's ePub, eg. http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=54477. It uses a top margin with a height of 5pt, hence the PRS-900 should at least display a little top margin.

I am trying to figure out what causes the problem since there are some book without a @page specification that works OK and some do not.
All the HarryT's Dickens book I tested worked OK for example.

Ok, so I just downloaded and installed "Tale of two cities" by HarryT and in normal mode there's a margin at the top of about ".75" of a line of text... So in my average room with light above me, and book at about 20 degrees, the shadow crops the tops of t's and l's... but "vowels" and so on look fine. I.e., "vowel" is fine except for the top of the l.

In "no margin" mode, the first whole line is in shadow... so it's much better.

By way of comparison... The Black Ice an old book by Michael Connelly from Sony has no top margin and so is in shadow the whole... I checked his new book "Nine Dragons" same problem.

I checked a different author from Sony... Inside Steve's Brain (about Steve Jobs) and it has the same problem.

Clearly the issue is that the epubs from Sony aren't inclusive of a margin...

Sigh. I'll yell at them right now.

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A lot of the ePub I downloaded from MR was without a top margin when displayed in my Gen3. Good that it is also a problem for PRS-900. Maybe that will get people to care about top margin.
I saw the 900 recently and did not find no top margin to be an issue at all.

I agree with Wolf, I have had my 900 now and have read about 3 books thus far. So far the bevel has not been an issue

Please open a software which is capable of displaying text in any sort. Take a look how characters are displayed near the edges by default. Any software, printed material and any visual styleguide i know follows this basic rule: Use at least a little margins because otherwise characters near display edges and other kind of lines will be harder to read for a lot of people.

Bottom margins should be larger than top margins and outer margins should be larger than inner margins and larger as the used line spacing as well. These are well known facts in book typography.

Please open a software which is capable of displaying text in any sort. Take a look how characters are displayed near the edges by default. Any software, printed material and any visual styleguide i know follows this basic rule: Use at least a little margins because otherwise characters near display edges and other kind of lines will be harder to read for a lot of people.

Bottom margins should be larger than top margins and outer margins should be larger than inner margins and larger as the used line spacing as well. These are well known facts in book typography.

Exactly.

But the reason that the inner margin is smaller is that the two inner margins on opposite sides adds together and the white space in the middle should not be greater than the outer margin. That is not an issue for an ebook reader but I assume the page number in the margin is a good reason to have larger outer margin.

This is similar to the 600, and even the 505 does this on ePubs with no margins set. It seems the ADE software assumes that the ePub will have the margin, and a lot of ePubs don't actually set margins most of the time.

So I just spent an hour chatting with two different folks in customer care and they are clueless to the problem. My guess is that this will not get fixed until a lot of people complain that the ePubs lack margin definition and/or they add a "create a margin" mode on the reader itself...

I just "pulled apart" one of the epubs, and I cannot honestly say I understand the format, since while there is CSS that indicates what to do it pretty clearly shows that there are no margins around paragraphs, there's also nothing that I can see in there that defines what to do at the top of the page of the reader...

So if someone could point me to that part of the CSS that'd be supremely helpful... i.e., how exactly do you specify a top or bottom margin for the page? If it's just the paragraph settings, then these are very clearly set to zero, as you can see below:

p.para-indent { display: block;
font-size: 10pt;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: normal;


margin-top: 0em;
margin-bottom: 0em;
margin-left: 0em;
margin-right: 0em;
text-indent: 1.5em;
}

p.para-flush { display: block;
font-size: 10pt;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: normal;


margin-top: 0em;
margin-bottom: 0em;
margin-left: 0em;
margin-right: 0em;
text-indent: 0em;
}

tx

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Perhaps answered my own question i saw this in one of HarryT's ePubs...:

<style type="text/css">@page { margin-bottom: 5.000000pt; margin-top: 5.000000pt; }</style>

is that the trick?

P

Perhaps answered my own question i saw this in one of HarryT's ePubs...:

<style type="text/css">@page { margin-bottom: 5.000000pt; margin-top: 5.000000pt; }</style>

is that the trick?

Yes, exactly.

Yes, exactly.

Well... then that stinks... since it implies I have to go through every HTML file and fix them :(... bad bad bad... not going to do it across the 80 books I bought from the store.

Arrgh... there must be another way... can it be done in the CSS itself rather than in the HTMLs? Or is this an ePub limitation?

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Well... then that stinks... since it implies I have to go through every HTML file and fix them :(... bad bad bad... not going to do it across the 80 books I bought from the store.

Arrgh... there must be another way... can it be done in the CSS itself rather than in the HTMLs? Or is this an ePub limitation?

P

Yes, you can put it in the css file. That was how I solved the problem for some of my books.

I'm struggling with the same issue since I installed the 2.0 firmware for the CyBook.

When you put the line:
@page { margin-bottom: 5.000000pt; margin-top: 5.000000pt; }
in the style.css file right beneath the <p> description it works. Then you don't have to edit all the different (x)html files in the epub.

I'm struggling with the same issue since I installed the 2.0 firmware for the CyBook.

When you put the line:
@page { margin-bottom: 5.000000pt; margin-top: 5.000000pt; }
in the style.css file right beneath the <p> description it works. Then you don't have to edit all the different (x)html files in the epub.

It works putting it first also. The page specification have nothing to to with <p>.

Ah!
I´m new to this stuff, so thanks for the tip.:2thumbsup

Ok, thanks all... that definitely works... so now I've got more data for our friends at Sony on how to fix this... even better, if they do it, then with "no margin mode" they can ignore it, and we're all happy!

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@kovidgoyal

Could you convert using calibre?

Gunner...