Css Drop Caps does not work in an Epub on a Reader

[Peter Sorotokin]

Originally Posted by Jellby

If I wanted to prevent this, forcing the second paragraph to begin below the drop cap, would it be possible?

This:

clear: left;

placed on the second paragraph should do the trick (but I have not tried it).

[Peter Sorotokin]

Originally Posted by brewt

Since our old friend Word (now with 300% more evil) doesn't do these things like this at all, and Indesign places Word Docs (taking with it the above-mentioned evil), is there a way to create the Drop Cap from within Indesign that would work in the Epub?

Frankly, I am not an expert on that. I mostly create my EPUBs by hand or from something called "FB2" (mostly used for Russian books). I think you really should treat InDesign export as a starting point; certainly styling scripts/tools are needed to do this sort of things.

And on the (I know - touchy) subject of "glitches", may we recommend employing our friend Kovid Goyal? Not that I speak for him, but as an admirer, his efforts toward this whole digital reading thing have been pretty darn good....

Oh, there is nothing touchy about bugs, especially bugs in CSS layout. Word may be evil, but CSS is insane. Unfortunately, we are stuck with both.

Kovid - I think he is studying for PhD in physics (as I once did). I'd say being a scientist is more noble than being a software engineer, so first, let's see if he gets bored with academia. Besides, he may not be able to work on free ebook stuff if he is employed by Adobe, so be careful what you wish for.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Peter Sorotokin

Kovid - I think he is studying for PhD in physics (as I once did). I'd say being a scientist is more noble than being a software engineer, so first, let's see if he gets bored with academia. Besides, he may not be able to work on free ebook stuff if he is employed by Adobe, so be careful what you wish for.

Don't know about noble, I will say it's harder What area of physics did you do your thesis in?

[Peter Sorotokin]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Don't know about noble, I will say it's harder What area of physics did you do your thesis in?

Well, it is easier to sell programs than theories ;-)

I did plasma and gas dynamics in that place: http://www.lle.rochester.edu/. But I have bailed out after getting MS.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Peter Sorotokin

clear: left;

Thanks, I used it, but not explicitly in the second paragraph, but in a "p.initial + p" selector (hoping that reading systems will support adjacent sibling selectors). What do people think about this, is it better having the second paragraph starting beside the drop cap or having a vertical space before it?

I also changed the "predrop" code to make it a bit more portable (now the displacement is from the top of the drop cap, not from the bottom).

[brewt]

That looks pretty darn good. If I read your epub directly (sony pic).

I'm just having trouble getting the idea to work with my stuff now.


When I try to re-render your file in Calibre, I get the old problem in DE. (DE pic)

Maybe I'm missing something on some other level in rendering in calibre? If I wanted to rebuild your file in calibre (with modifications, say, adding double quotes) how would I rebuild it?

Calibre's Epub-to-epub got different results in DE/sony - my attempt at rebuilding it in calibre is attached. The Calibre Viewer seems to see the Calibre-rendered version ok, but DE has issues with it.

-bjc

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by brewt

When I try to re-render your file in Calibre, I get the old problem in DE. (DE pic)

Is that my file run through Calibre and saved as a different epub file (maybe with modifications)? Does the DE pic correspond to the epub file you attached? Does DE render the original file correctly (the drop cap and the poetry fragment under the chapter heading)?

If I wanted to rebuild your file in calibre (with modifications, say, adding double quotes) how would I rebuild it?

I don't know... I just unzip, modify with a text editor, and zip again. It seems Calibre is generating .css files for each chapter (maybe with the properties you modified), but I don't see what could be confusing DE.

[brewt]

Clumsy of me:

The Sony pic is of your original epub. - Chapter 28.jpg
We've so far seen Sony and DE to render the drop caps similarly, and yes, DE did your original epub correctly, too.

The epub I attached was a straight re-render of the epub through calibre - I didn't change anything. Loaded it in, asked it to rebuild the epub.

The DE picture is of the re-rendered epub - the Sony viewer had the same problem on the re-rendered. - Chapter28-calibre-rendered.jpg

chapter28-calibre-viewer.jpg is of the calibre-re-rendered epub, in the calibre viewer.

Yes, calibre outputs 3 css's per html file. I've seen these css's exceed 1 meg in size, if I chose really aweful rtf files to start with.

I spent most of the morning trying to replicate your solution, and found that I couldn't get it to work by rendering in calibre.

-bjc

[Jellby]

Well, I bit the bullet and installed Digital Editions in a Windows computer, I have to transfer the files between computers for testing, though.

I noticed that DE does not seem to support "position: relative" which means the "predrop" class (Ch. XXX, XXXIII) was not working properly. I change the code into something that seems to work. I also noticed I had the width and height of the cover image mixed up.

span.predrop {
  font-size: 25%;
  font-weight: normal;
  vertical-align: top;
  line-height: 1.9;
  /*position: relative;
  top: 0.4em;*/ /*ADE does not support this*/
}

Other problems with DE are:

- It does not support "font-variant: small-caps", or at least the last sentence of the book is not rendered correctly.

- It breaks lines before an em-dash. This is incorrect in Spanish, where em-dashes are used very much like parentheses. Think of a linebreak just before a closing parenthesis.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Well, I bit the bullet and installed Digital Editions in a Windows computer, I have to transfer the files between computers for testing, though.

Did running ADE under Wine not work for you?

Originally Posted by Jellby

- It does not support "font-variant: small-caps", or at least the last sentence of the book is not rendered correctly.

Indeed :-/.

Originally Posted by Jellby

- It breaks lines before an em-dash. This is incorrect in Spanish, where em-dashes are used very much like parentheses. Think of a linebreak just before a closing parenthesis.

Yah, it appears to consider before and after any em dash fair game for a break, even places where breaks would be inappropriate in English as well. I tried solving this by using the Unicode "Word Joiner" character, but ADE doesn't recognize it. Much less ideally, but actually working across multiple renderers, I wrapped non-breaking bits in <span/>s with "white-space: nowrap" set. Thus CSS:

.nobreak {
  white-space: nowrap;
}

And markup:

<p><span class="nobreak">—These</span> em dashes are like <span class="nobreak">parentheses!—</span></p>

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by llasram

Did running ADE under Wine not work for you?

I have an oldish linux in this computer, and it's already a bit crammed. My last experiences with Wine here were rather disappointing (like all text disappearing, it was impossible what the menus and buttons were for), so I decided it was better to install it somewhere else.

<p><span class="nobreak">—These</span> em dashes are like <span class="nobreak">parentheses!—</span></p>

Oh, my! I refuse to add that sort of markup to my books. It gets even more confusing if you have:

<p>—These em dashes are <em>like parentheses</em>!—</p>

Since <em> and <span> have to be properly nested, you'd have to close and reopen the <em>.

EDIT: Another thing DE seems to do is ignore the "linear=no" spine property...

[llasram]

Originally Posted by Jellby

I have an oldish linux in this computer, and it's already a bit crammed. My last experiences with Wine here were rather disappointing (like all text disappearing, it was impossible what the menus and buttons were for), so I decided it was better to install it somewhere else.

Ah, fair enough. If/when you have GNU/Linux running on a more newish computer, ADE under Wine 1.0.1 runs 100% perfectly, with no glitches whatsoever.

Originally Posted by Jellby

Oh, my! I refuse to add that sort of markup to my books. It gets even more confusing if you have:

<p>—These em dashes are <em>like parentheses</em>!—</p>

Since <em> and <span> have to be properly nested, you'd have to close and reopen the <em>.

Alas, yes :-/. You could use Word Joiner and programmatically transmute so-joined text into the admittedly unfortunate markup.

Originally Posted by Jellby

EDIT: Another thing DE seems to do is ignore the "linear=no" spine property...

To be fair though, the OPF spec does say that reader systems may ignore the distinction between primary (linear="yes") and auxiliary (linear="no") content.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by llasram

To be fair though, the OPF spec does say that reader systems may ignore the distinction between primary (linear="yes") and auxiliary (linear="no") content.

Yes, that's true, I just expected it to do something else...

Well, enough of talking about DE's shortcomings, this thread was about the drop caps, and I think the issue is solved for the moment, I'll be updating my epub files during the weekend.

[brewt]

Attached is a re-render of your message 54 epub out of calibre, with a screen shot in ADE of chapter 1 of the re-render, and a sreenshot of your original in ADE.

The header on your original xhtml looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>CapÃ*tulo I</title>
<link href="css/style.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
</head>
<body>

When the xhtml comes out of calibre, the header looks like this:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<title>CapÃ*tulo I</title>
<link href="resources/style_3_9.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet"/>
<link href="resources/Capitulo-01_0.css" type="text/css" charset="UTF-8" rel="stylesheet"/>
<link href="resources/Capitulo-01_1.css" type="text/css" charset="UTF-8" rel="stylesheet"/>
<link href="resources/Capitulo-01_2.css" type="text/css" charset="UTF-8" rel="stylesheet"/>
</head>
<body>

Could the lack of doctype in the re-render have anything to do with why it looks different? Or maybe the change to a content type?


-bjc
Charter Member, Deceased Equine Abuse Society.

[brewt]

I WILL FINALLY DECLARE IT TO BE GOOD.

Mr Goyal pointed out a calibre-built solution in the settings for epub - set the Create Epub/Page Setup/Base Font Size to 0pt, and the llasram/Jellby/Peter solution works coming out of Calibre, too.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36688

-bjc