Spacing before chapter title stopped working :(

[pilcrowphile]

For reference, I'm hand coding with kindlegen, and using style sheets from books where this has worked previously.

Basically, I'm used to forcing the chapter heading down a few spaces by using a couple <p>&nbsp;</p>. This has never been an issue before.

So now I'm working on a new client's book (non fiction rather than fiction for the first time, so the paragraphs have spaces between them and no indenting, via p {text-indent: 0; margin-top:0.6em;} )

Now, when I do a dummy copy (I usually start with a blank version of my book, with just a cover, title page, TOC and first chapter with a bit of dummy text).

The book seems to come all right, but when I pop it the kindle ap on my smartphone, the only bumpdown that works is on the title page. Everything else is flush with the top.

So I try setting a special 'top' class of paragraph, first with 2em margin top then with 24pt margin top, no change.

I try changing the CSS on the H3 with a larger margin-top, no change.

Then I even go back and grab the old html of another book, where I've got a copy of the book where the bumpdown works. I strip out most of the body, and try rerunning it... and the bumpdown appears to have disappeared as well.

This is driving me up a wall! I expected to be done with this book by now, but I've spent the last 3 hours trying various trouble shooting attempts at getting there to be a little whitespace above the chapter headings.

Any ideas what might be going on?

[lissie]

Did you ever get this working - I can get top margins honoured for fist paragraphs - but not when I have aheader straight after a forced page break - it seems to be ignoring all top margins after the Kindle forced page break code

[GrannyGrump]

I haven't worked with kindle books yet, but in ePub, sometimes you need to use *padding* instead of *margin*. Would that work for your problem?

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by pilcrowphile

For reference, I'm hand coding with kindlegen, and using style sheets from books where this has worked previously.

Basically, I'm used to forcing the chapter heading down a few spaces by using a couple <p>&nbsp;</p>. This has never been an issue before.

So now I'm working on a new client's book (non fiction rather than fiction for the first time, so the paragraphs have spaces between them and no indenting, via p {text-indent: 0; margin-top:0.6em;} )

Now, when I do a dummy copy (I usually start with a blank version of my book, with just a cover, title page, TOC and first chapter with a bit of dummy text).

The book seems to come all right, but when I pop it the kindle ap on my smartphone, the only bumpdown that works is on the title page. Everything else is flush with the top.

So I try setting a special 'top' class of paragraph, first with 2em margin top then with 24pt margin top, no change.

I try changing the CSS on the H3 with a larger margin-top, no change.

Then I even go back and grab the old html of another book, where I've got a copy of the book where the bumpdown works. I strip out most of the body, and try rerunning it... and the bumpdown appears to have disappeared as well.

This is driving me up a wall! I expected to be done with this book by now, but I've spent the last 3 hours trying various trouble shooting attempts at getting there to be a little whitespace above the chapter headings.

Any ideas what might be going on?

Have you tried using a % with a header class, instead of a paragraph class? Why are you using a para class for a chapter head? And when you say, "client," do you mean paying work?

Hitch

[lissie]

Originally Posted by grannyGrumpy

I haven't worked with kindle books yet, but in ePub, sometimes you need to use *padding* instead of *margin*. Would that work for your problem?

Good thought - unfortunately it didn't make any difference

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by lissie

Good thought - unfortunately it didn't make any difference

Is your smartphone displaying a K8 version? K8 will not use empty paragraphs for padding, and you may have something in your paragraph class that is cascading and overriding what you are doing, as you said you are using P classes for your chapter heads, rather than header classes, yes?

At this point, I think we'd need to see some sample content and the stylesheet.

Hitch

[lissie]

I didn't say I was using paragrah styles - not sure where you got that from -I'm using heading styles - as you do

My CSS is:

h1 {
text-align: center;
color: #CD1634;
padding-top: 7em;
}

and I've also tried margin-top:7em;

The html is

<MBP:PAGEBREAK />
<h1> My title</h1>

I'm seeing it not be honoured in: Kindle keyboard, kindle 4, iOS, and in the kindle previewer

I've also tried adding in

<br />

above the header as well as

<p> &nbsp;</p>

theese are ignored as well.

[toertchn]

My experience some time ago:

spaces before headings only work for the first elements of the body in an html document.

The only reason I found was to split the single html file with many <mbp:pagebreaks> into many files.

[Jellby]

Reading systems are allowed to ignore vertical margin after a forced pagebreak, that's how the CSS specification works. Some of the tricks suggested above should work in an ePub book, but with a Kindle you are at the mercy of whatever the converter is doing to the code. Try a different converter.

Another thing you could try is CSS pagebreaks instead of mobi-specific ones:

<div class="pagebreak">&nbsp;</p>

div.pagebreak {
  page-break-before: always;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  height: 0;
}

In HTML+CSS, the margin that would be ignored is that of the <div>, but not the one of the following element (the <hX>), but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't make any difference after conversion.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by toertchn

My experience some time ago:

spaces before headings only work for the first elements of the body in an html document.

The only reason I found was to split the single html file with many <mbpagebreaks> into many files.

@toertchn is correct. You need to make your "chapters" or whatever the headings are breaking into separate documents. Separate html documents, like in an ePUB. That's the only way it will work in KindleGen.

It's been this way for quite a few gens of Kindlegen now. I don't recall precisely when it changed; but it did.

I misunderstood your earlier statement when you said:

Basically, I'm used to forcing the chapter heading down a few spaces by using a couple <p>&nbsp;</p>. This has never been an issue before.

Hitch

[lissie]

Thanks guys - what an annoying work around!

[DiapDealer]

It's actually fairly standard procedure.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by lissie

Thanks guys - what an annoying work around!

@lissie:

As the revered Diap said, it's a fairly standard practice, especially when it comes to older devices, which load a book file-by-file. It will make the book load faster and work better. It's not just to make Chapter headers work. ;-) It's absolutely de rigueur for ePUBs for that reason.

Hitch

[GMcG]

Try this:

<h1><br /><br /><br />My title</h1>

(<br /> should not be *before* the header but *within*.)

George

[dgatwood]

Ignoring top margins immediately after an internal page break is a known quirk with Kindle readers:

https://kdp.amazon.com/community/mes...ssageID=311217

If you don't want to split the file into multiple HTML files, you can probably work around this quirk by adding a block element before the <h1> tag, e.g.

<div style="height: 1px; width: 1px"></div>
<h1> ... </h1>