text-decoration-style: dashed;

[JLius]

Hi all

.u {
  text-decoration: underline;
  text-decoration-style: dashed;
}

<p class="u">some text</p>

just gives me a straight line. How do I get the dashes instead?

thanks!

[Jellby]

With an ePub3 reader?

text-decoration-style is a CSS3 property, I don't think there's an equivalent in CSS2. You could fake it with a bottom border, but that won't work nice with line breaks.

[dgatwood]

There's nothing in the spec that precludes CSS 3 feature support; they just aren't required to be supported. Your best bet would be to file a bug report with each of the EPUB reader vendors asking them to support that CSS property. (Good luck.)

[theducks]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

There's nothing in the spec that precludes CSS 3 feature support; they just aren't required to be supported. Your best bet would be to file a bug report with each of the EPUB reader vendors asking them to support that CSS property. (Good luck.)

but there is Reality

RMSDK (at least on older devices) will barf on an invalid style
(the SPEC say it should ignore those. They did...by ignoring the whole stylesheet)

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by theducks

RMSDK (at least on older devices) will barf on an invalid style
(the SPEC say it should ignore those. They did...by ignoring the whole stylesheet)

That's not precisely true. The RMSDK uses incorrect rules for skipping declarations that trigger parse errors according to CSS specifications. As a result, unknown @ rules fail spectacularly (because it doesn't parse them correctly as an @ rule), as do rules that include unknown functions (keywords followed by parenthesized expressions) as part of their value, IIRC, because it doesn't correctly use parenthesis/brace matching until the semicolon that terminates the rule, or something.

However, plain-jane unknown rules are ignored correctly, in my experience, as are unknown constants, so "text-decoration-style: dashed;" should be ignored correctly by even older RMSDK versions.

[crankypants]

Originally Posted by Jellby

With an ePub3 reader?

text-decoration-style is a CSS3 property, I don't think there's an equivalent in CSS2. You could fake it with a bottom border, but that won't work nice with line breaks.

Thanks for that. That explains why none of my EPUB2 books display an underline, because I used that CSS.

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by crankypants

Thanks for that. That explains why none of my EPUB2 books display an underline, because I used that CSS.

I bet if you view them in iBooks, they will. Or translate them and view them on Kindle. Both use WebKit, which (depending on version) should recognize those styles. I think.

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by crankypants

Thanks for that. That explains why none of my EPUB2 books display an underline, because I used that CSS.

Nope, because an underline in CSS2 (and thus ePUB2) is supported and works. It is the text-decoration-style property that is CSS3. The property text-decoration itself does work.