Centering an ornament between paragraphs

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by odedta

Actually, he can use 60% as well and the image is still aligned to center on iBooks, I tested my code before I posted it and it works on iBooks :/

I'm not sure about iPad 1 iBooks version though. (iOS 5.1.1)

Well, I'm not sure if there's a misunderstanding here, but the issue wasn't being able to center horizontally, but vertically -- I just couldn't seem to get the top/bottom margins to be equidistant when using that image in the poems (specifically), although for whatever reason I managed to do it when using the same image as a section break in the main text.

(And if you're wondering, I was supposed to be gone from here hours ago, but this ebooking stuff is far too absorbing -- and fun! -- sometimes! I better get going soon, though...)

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by odedta

Actually, he can use 60% as well and the image is still aligned to center on iBooks, I tested my code before I posted it and it works on iBooks :/

I'm not sure about iPad 1 iBooks version though. (iOS 5.1.1)

I don't recall, off the top of my head, what the problem is with that, but there is one. To make it work across the board, including first-gen iBooks, it's the image wrapped in a p wrapped in a div solution, and you can't size the image directly, not at all. Hell, even Liz talked about it in ePUB:STTP.

Hitch

[mrmikel]

As far as the vertical centering (or anything else) have you looked at the epub in Sigil or calibre editor where they show what CSS is acting on the text in question?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Psymon

Okay! To heck with the stupid graphical ornament for the breaks in the poems. It's really weird that I was able to get the ornament in the section breaks in the main text to center vertically okay, but not in the poems, but at this point I give up, and decided to go with what one of the print editions of this book uses, which is a row of three asterisks. This looked nice, and served the purpose, but naturally one might think that there would still be the issue of the top/bottom margins of that row of asterisks not looking equal, because asterisks are inherently "superscript"-like characters, of course.

Since you seem to be able to do what you want by using a font character, why not embed a font that has ornaments and pick one of them to use for the section breaks.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

As far as the vertical centering (or anything else) have you looked at the epub in Sigil or calibre editor where they show what CSS is acting on the text in question?

Um, I'm designing the whole thing in Sigil, so it's kinda hard to avoid seeing what code affects what (especially since I'm the one that put it all in there)!

Also, JSWolf wrote...

Originally Posted by ;2900053

Since you seem to be able to do what you want by using a font character, why not embed a font that has ornaments and pick one of them to use for the section breaks.

I actually did that before, with the first ebook I designed (remember the one with all "ye olde fonts")? In the process of doing that, I discovered that the problem with using an ornament(al) font in that way is that if people turn off the publisher's font -- or their device just doesn't support embedded fonts at all -- then you end up with a stupid letter (or whatever other character) where the ornament is supposed to be. When I first designed that other, first book of mine, with fonts turned off you ended up with a BIG letter "d" underneath all the chapter headings (where I'd used a font ornament in the same way I used the graphical one for this current one). To try to accommodate for that, what I did was edit the font, put the ornament I wanted to use in the em-dash slot, and so if people did turn off the embedded font then at least they'd have what looked like a small underline (at a large font size) underneath the chapter headings.

In other words... yeah, that was definitely something I considered! But for this current context, with my needing that "poem break" in only two places in the 500-odd page book, I figured this asterisk thing would work out okay (and it looks okay, too).

[mrmikel]

I thought there was a live CSS function in Sigil too. There is one in the calibre editor. It shows what CSS is active at any given point.

You might use the calibre editor to look at the css.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

I thought there was a live CSS function in Sigil too. There is one in the calibre editor. It shows what CSS is active at any given point.

You might use the calibre editor to look at the css.

I guess I don't understand what you mean -- if I'm looking at a paragraph (or whatever else), in Sigil I can see both the code and the preview at the same time, so how could I not know what CSS is "active" for what I'm looking at?

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Psymon

I guess I don't understand what you mean -- if I'm looking at a paragraph (or whatever else), in Sigil I can see both the code and the preview at the same time, so how could I not know what CSS is "active" for what I'm looking at?

Because it could be getting inherited from another element, and CSS tends to be based in stylesheets which you aren't in the middle of viewing, and the rules start getting tricky?

Unless you have a very good memory for all the CSS you put in...

The Live CSS view in calibre editor (Sigil does NOT have such a tool) is designed to simplify for you which classes, elements, and ids they possess or inherit from, (what rules from where affect each element,) and links to the locations where those rules can be edited.

http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/edit...live-css-panel

[GMcG]

In Sigil and in Calibre the width of the cover.jpg is defined in the <img> tag, not in the stylesheet.
In Sigil it is simply width="100%", in Calibre it is like style="width: 100%" (actually it is height).

You could try the same with your ornament.

in HTML
<p class="img"><img alt="verse break" width="38%" src="../Images/ornament-black.jpg" /></p>

in CSS
p.img {
text-indent: 0;
text-align: center;
margin-top: 0.38em;
margin-bottom: 0.38em;
}

As to: "the top margin invariably ended up bigger than the bottom margin"

I think, it has nothing to do with margins, but with the size of the ornament. Probably the height is less than that of the font-size. Because the orientation of the graphic is at the basis of a line, you will get more space above than below. See it in the sample with some text to make it clearer.
You could use the same ornament but in a higher image with some more space at the bottom and less at the top, in other words: lifting it a little bit within the picture. That would compensate the too big margin to the preceeding paragraph.

George

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

I thought there was a live CSS function in Sigil too. There is one in the calibre editor. It shows what CSS is active at any given point.

You might use the calibre editor to look at the css.

View-->Preview has a Console for previewing elements, and you can view the CSS and metrics from there in Sigil. FWIW.

Hitch

[Psymon]

Wow, thanks -- once again! -- for all these helpful replies, everyone! But y'know what? I think that at this end of things, I'll just stick with that asterisks way of separating the breaks in the poems (which is also reminiscent of how various print versions have done it, too), if only because it's just so much simpler and less problematic.

And re those "preview consoles" in both Sigil and Calibre, I took a look at both (it took a while for me to find the one in the latter!) and yikes, I think that's complicating things too much for me! "TMI", as the kids say (ha ha), and I seem to manage okay just working on things as I do.

I suppose I'm pretty much done now with my query here -- and it has indeed been very fruitful and informative for me, and I hope it has been (or will be) for others, too).

I do have one other quick question (which I presume has a simple answer) related to this Walden ebook that I've been working on, which I hope I can just toss in here without starting a new thread -- if I should do so, though, please just let me know.

When I started this current ebook, it was just going to be Thoreau's "Walden" and nothing more, but now that I've been working on it for a while, it would appear that it's becoming more like "Walden & Other Writings", with various essays and excerpts from his other books, plus some biographical stuff, etc., too.

Right now I have "Walden" all done (along with his "Civil Disobedience" essay), which in landscape mode takes 576 page, and in portrait 312. I'm just guessing, but by the time I add in all the other additional stuff, I could easily see that pretty much doubling the book in size/length.

Is that getting "too big" for an ebook? I do realize that the bigger an ebook is, the longer it takes to load/render. Surely there are other HUGE books that have been published in ebook format, though (James Joyce's "Ulysses", or "Moby Dick", or collections of Shakespeare's plays or whatever else)?

Thanks again, everyone!

[mrmikel]

I think the render speed has more to do with the size of the chunks that make it up. There are so pretty big books on here, including the Bible. They will take a while to load, but once loaded, not such a big deal as far as I'm concerned.

[dickloraine]

"The complete Malazan Book of the Fallen" opens without problems on my aura. And that are 10 Books with 1000 pages minimum each.

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by dickloraine

"The complete Malazan Book of the Fallen" opens without problems on my aura. And that are 10 Books with 1000 pages minimum each.

Yes, but most probably each book is divided in separate chapters and files.

[dickloraine]

Of course. I just wanted to support mrmikel. If a book is properly build, its size doesn't matter for most of the readers. Maybe there is some outliner somewhere that renders the whole book, but then I would blame the software.