Why won't PRS-350 honor all ePub stylesheets?

PatNY · 11-07-2010, 02:19 PM

I'm stumped. My PRS-350 is reading some epub stylesheets correctly, but in other epubs, it seems to be ignoring things like centering and text-indent instructions. So where I have instructions to indent paragraphs by 1.5em, in some epubs on the reader they show up as paragraphs with no indentation. And design elements that are supposed to be centered end up flush left.

I can't see any significant difference between the stylesheets it is honoring and those it is not. Moreover, in all cases, Calibre's internal epub viewer correctly renders all these epubs.

Has anyone seen this behavior? Anyone have a clue what is going on? Maybe there is some obscure css coding that is tripping up the PRS-350 but I can't figure out what it is.

jswinden · 11-07-2010, 02:45 PM

Never encountered a problem with CSS unless the syntax was incorrect. It is pretty easy to leave off a double-quotation mark, semi-colon, curly bracket, etc. If you do you might get some weird effects. Also, it is pretty easy to get the syntax in the HTML incorrect. I once searched a long time trying to discover why a particular CSS style would not work correctly and finally noticed that I had typed the class name incorrectly into the HTML tag. That is, it was spelled slightly different from what I used in the CSS. You must also be careful with case sensitivity.

PatNY · 11-07-2010, 05:42 PM

Jack, thanks. You pointed me in the right direction. I looked at the epub's stylesheet and still couldn't notice anything out of sorts, but I remembered that Calibre can sometimes "fix" and correct things in a stylesheet and epub. So I ran an epub-to-epub conversion in Calibre and, sure enough, the the reader now picked up the CSS, and paragraph indents and centering appeared as specified.

What threw me off was that Calibre's viewer and Stanza on the Touch were both displaying the epub correctly. So I guess the Sony readers are just a little bit more finicky when it comes to stylesheets.

The problematic epubs were all ones I had tweaked via Calibre's tweak epub feature. I just have to remember now to always do an epub-to-epub conversion at the end.

11-07-2010, 02:19 PM	#1
PatNY Zennist Posts: 1,022 Karma: 47809468 Join Date: Jul 2010 Device: iPod Touch, Sony PRS-350, Nook HD+ & HD	Why won't PRS-350 honor all ePub stylesheets? I'm stumped. My PRS-350 is reading some epub stylesheets correctly, but in other epubs, it seems to be ignoring things like centering and text-indent instructions. So where I have instructions to indent paragraphs by 1.5em, in some epubs on the reader they show up as paragraphs with no indentation. And design elements that are supposed to be centered end up flush left. I can't see any significant difference between the stylesheets it is honoring and those it is not. Moreover, in all cases, Calibre's internal epub viewer correctly renders all these epubs. Has anyone seen this behavior? Anyone have a clue what is going on? Maybe there is some obscure css coding that is tripping up the PRS-350 but I can't figure out what it is. Last edited by PatNY; 11-07-2010 at 02:28 PM.

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11-07-2010, 02:45 PM	#2
jswinden Nameless Being	Never encountered a problem with CSS unless the syntax was incorrect. It is pretty easy to leave off a double-quotation mark, semi-colon, curly bracket, etc. If you do you might get some weird effects. Also, it is pretty easy to get the syntax in the HTML incorrect. I once searched a long time trying to discover why a particular CSS style would not work correctly and finally noticed that I had typed the class name incorrectly into the HTML tag. That is, it was spelled slightly different from what I used in the CSS. You must also be careful with case sensitivity.

11-07-2010, 05:42 PM	#3
PatNY Zennist Posts: 1,022 Karma: 47809468 Join Date: Jul 2010 Device: iPod Touch, Sony PRS-350, Nook HD+ & HD	Jack, thanks. You pointed me in the right direction. I looked at the epub's stylesheet and still couldn't notice anything out of sorts, but I remembered that Calibre can sometimes "fix" and correct things in a stylesheet and epub. So I ran an epub-to-epub conversion in Calibre and, sure enough, the the reader now picked up the CSS, and paragraph indents and centering appeared as specified. What threw me off was that Calibre's viewer and Stanza on the Touch were both displaying the epub correctly. So I guess the Sony readers are just a little bit more finicky when it comes to stylesheets. The problematic epubs were all ones I had tweaked via Calibre's tweak epub feature. I just have to remember now to always do an epub-to-epub conversion at the end.

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