Quote:
Originally Posted by shall1028
As you have not posted the epub file for us to have a look at (a very common occurrence with these sorts of questions) I am going to have to attempt to divine the solution blind.
I believe I know what is wrong! Go into your kitchen and unplug your toaster or blender or both if you have both. There is obviously radio frequency interference with those appliances.
On the other hand you could get rid of all those <span class="italic">some text</span> entries and replace them with <i>some text</i> or <em>some text</em> if you like. Then check your CSS and remove font-style: italic; from the I or EM definitions.
SPAN and DIV have their uses but why use them to replace I or EM (or B or STRONG for that matter)? Of course, Calibre not using <p> for bog standard paragraphs is silly too. |
I really don't feel like I can upload the whole epub file as it is a copyrighted book written by someone else. I unplugged the toaster and blender as you suggested and that seems to have helped.
I had already tried using simply <em>some text</em> and <i>some text</i> to no avail. I agree that simple is best for ebooks. As ereading devices are offering more and more control to the individual reader (the new Kobo firmware now allows the reader to select from several fonts or install their own fonts, set line spacing and margins) I think in most cases we should not be embedding fonts or specifying margin widths or line spacing. Only in
relative ways as for headings or required white space. When I did books for Kindle, I removed all span tags and almost all class attributes, leaving simply <p> as you suggested for most paragraphs. It was only in my converting the PRC files that I had prepared to upload to Amazon to EPUB (through Calibre and Sigil) that I ended up with all sorts of CSS stuff.
Anyway, I've seen a few places now that have said that books which have been sideloaded to the Kobo have a problem with italics and bold since the new firmware release a few days ago. I expect Kobo will fix this soon. I'm pretty confident that has caused my problem.
Thanks very much to those of you who offered help!