TOC & other questions

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Nathanael

Really? Now that's interesting. Since center is the default for <hr>, you shouldn't have to do anything to center it. Is ADE really that broken?

--Nathanael

since the other default for hr is 100%, how would they know
<classic_image: 3 Monkeys>

[capidamonte]

Originally Posted by Nathanael

Also not true. FBReader is one of the viewers I use regularly to check my work. I use stylesheets for all my styling (even the stuff Sigil puts in headers eventually gets moved to a stylesheet), and FBReader adequately displays almost everything I do. No it doesn't support the full CSS spec, but I've yet to find a viewer that does (save for Ibis or Bookworm, but those are online apps).



Do you have specific examples? So far, I've been pretty satisfied with it.

--Nathanael

Try one of these. Make sure you compare it to something like ePubReader or Lucidor or something. Even ADE does a decent job once the CSS is tweaked.

[Ahmad Samir]

Deleted.

[DTM]

Regarding Stanza's treatment of styles, there is an approach that makes centering and other styles work.

First, under Settings/Layout be sure that Display Styles is "On". Without that, it pretty much ignores everything. But even with it on, Stanza still ignores an awful lot of style information, including centering.

However, if you really want something centered, you can get Stanza to do it by including the !important tag in your CSS. Thus, I use an entry like this:

.centered
{
text-align:center !important;
}

If you apply that to a paragraph, hr, etc., then Stanza will center it when Display Styles is on. You must include the !important tag on everything that you want to force Stanza to accept.

Now, !important is really supposed to be used to override what the user may try to do differently than what you intend, and that should be done rarely and with great caution. It would be a very bad idea to use it to force a particular font face or size, because a user with low vision might not be able to read your choices, and everyone else will likely be annoyed. But ordinary formatting, such as centering an hr shouldn't be an issue for anyone.

And now...

<rant>
In my opinion, this is unacceptable behavior on the part of Stanza. Being able to turn styles off is a very good feature, but they've made it impossible to truly turn styles on. If I, as the publisher, don't care about formatting, I'll just provide a txt file and be done with it. But if I do care about formatting, I shouldn't have to make special provisions for specific readers or reader software. We're back to the days of "this website will only display properly in [fill in browser name here]". I had hoped we all learned from that mess.
</rant>

[PatNY]

Originally Posted by DTM

However, if you really want something centered, you can get Stanza to do it by including the !important tag in your CSS. Thus, I use an entry like this:

.centered
{
text-align:center !important;
}

DMT, that works great. Thanks for the tip.

I put "!important;" into an existing style instead of making a separate "centered" style and it works fine on Stanza. However, when I do an epub-to-epub conversion in Calibre, "!important" is stripped out of the stylesheet. Does the style need to be called "centered"? If so, can I add other style attributes to it such as margin-left and font weight values?

I agree with you that there is no reason Stanza should not support standard center tags. I would ditch Stanza because of that if I could find a substitute as good. But Stanza's flexibility and the ease with which it interfaces with Calibre are why I will live with this quirk.

I also think we won't be seeing any further development and improvements to Stanza in the future as Amazon owns it and they have no incentive to strengthen it as it is a competitor in some ways to their kindle app. That's too bad.

[DTM]

Originally Posted by PatNY

I put "!important;" into an existing style instead of making a separate "centered" style and it works fine on Stanza. However, when I do an epub-to-epub conversion in Calibre, "!important" is stripped out of the stylesheet. Does the style need to be called "centered"? If so, can I add other style attributes to it such as margin-left and font weight values?

The style need not be called "centered"; you can call it anything you want.

Yes, you can include any other attributes in any style, that's part of what's so great about using CSS.

Not sure why Calibre would strip that out, unless it's just not aware of !important and thinks it's some garbage that shouldn't be there. In that case, I'd call it a bug, but I just use Calibre to manage my library, so I know very little about conversions.

I would ditch Stanza as well, but as you say, what else is there? I've tried every one I can find and all of them range from "much worse" to "unusable". (Of course, I have not upgraded to OS4, so I have not tried iBooks.)

[PatNY]

The !important addition seems to be working very well -- even in centering images.

However, I have a dedication in one book that won't center. Below is the code. DMT (or anyone else), can you see anything wrong with this code?

.ded {
display: block;
font-size: 0.70588em;
font-style: italic;
margin-bottom: 1em;
margin-left: 0;
margin-right: 0;
margin-top: 2em;
padding-top: 2em;
text-align: center !important;
text-indent: 0
}

The dedication is centered in Calibre's viewer. But Stanza is refusing to comply.

Maybe it's just Stanza refusing to totally give up its control!

[DTM]

It looks OK to me.

One thing you should know, however, is that you're not supposed to have a space after the colon in the declarations. I don't know if that makes a difference in Stanza, but it does in some rendering software.

Where have you placed this style definition? I just came across an issue over on the Stanza support forum, in which Stanza Support stated that "Stanza ignores the styles in the header of individual XHTML files." You have to put it inline or in a separate CSS file. GRRRR!

[PatNY]

Originally Posted by DTM

One thing you should know, however, is that you're not supposed to have a space after the colon in the declarations. I don't know if that makes a difference in Stanza, but it does in some rendering software.

The overwhelming majority of css sheets I've looked at all have a space after the colon. That includes the css for this particular book for which I can't get the dedication centered. The book is by Random House/Delacorte press and it's very professionally formatted and designed. So I think they use designers with knowledge of css sheets and html code.

At any rate, I went into the css stylesheet and closed up the space. It made no difference. Stanza still won't center the dedication.

Where have you placed this style definition? I just came across an issue over on the Stanza support forum, in which Stanza Support stated that "Stanza ignores the styles in the header of individual XHTML files." You have to put it inline or in a separate CSS file. GRRRR!

It's in the css. I try to avoid inline or styling in the header as much as possible and rarely use them, especially styling in the header.

Below is the entire coding for that dedication page. Do you see anything out of the ordinary? I am really stumped. The !important addition seems to be working everywhere else. But in this case, the dedication is just scrunched up to the top left corner of the page in Stanza as if there were no !important designation. I think maybe Stanza is just throwing up a fit and rebelling!

page coding:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head>
<title>The Cloud Atlas</title>
<meta name="Adept.resource" value="urn:uuid:68c8cf51-d1e0-4a9a-9fcf-6d5a4436ca75"/>
<meta content="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"/><link href="../stylesheet.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet"/><style type="text/css">
		@page { margin-bottom: 5.000000pt; margin-top: 5.000000pt; }</style></head>
<body class="calibre"><div id="ded" class="calibre1">
</br>
<p class="ded">To Lucy<br class="ded"/>
Would that I had<br class="ded"/>
had such a map</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>

[DTM]

You can usually get away with the space after the colon, but it's not strictly right, so it seemed like a good straw to grasp.

The only thing that looks strange is the </br> with no matching opening tag. That shouldn't make a difference, but maybe Stanza confuses easily. Beyond that, I'm stumped.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by DTM

You can usually get away with the space after the colon, but it's not strictly right, so it seemed like a good straw to grasp.

The only thing that looks strange is the </br> with no matching opening tag. That shouldn't make a difference, but maybe Stanza confuses easily. Beyond that, I'm stumped.

Calibre: uses a space after the colon. Millions of converted files.
Sigil uses a space after the colon: Many happy users

I did note that ADE balkes if yo put a space between the digits and the units.
.5 em ,no
.5em, yes
leading 0's seem to work ok

[PatNY]

Originally Posted by DTM

The only thing that looks strange is the </br> with no matching opening tag. That shouldn't make a difference, but maybe Stanza confuses easily. Beyond that, I'm stumped.

Hey, that was it! It was actually supposed to be a simple <br> tag to add an extra line of space. So I had the wrong tag anyway. But taking it out and putting in another bit of code (<p><code><br /></code></p>) gave me that extra line, and the page was now able to pick up the centering instructions from the stylesheet.

Thanks for looking that over.