Paragraph spacing when creating eBooks?

[Snowman]

I do most of my reading on my Cybook, and experimented for some time to find a font face and size, along with para indent and spacing that I was most comfortable with. I wanted it to look good (for me) primarily on the Cybook, with a PC screen as a secondary device.

I chose a couple of Roger Taylor's Hawklan Series books, since they are simply formatted with <p>text</p>, are nice and large, and I enjoy re-reading them. I found that on the whole I preferred the serif font family, with a font size of third or forth up from the smallest on the Cybook. I'm quite happy with the default 'Georgia' font, though I have tried others.

Having selected the font, I narrowed the spacing options down (using em's and %'s), then fine-tuned using px, to get to my current paragraph css settings, which are:

p { margin-top: 10px; text-indent: 25px; }
.p { margin-top: 10px; text-indent: 25px; }

The whole process took me about three weeks.

It would be good to be able to change these on the fly, as you can with justification (if it hasn't been forced), but I keep the source, so a minor edit at the top of the file along with a recompile is simple (and easily scriptable) should my reading preferences change.

The .p class, incidentally, is for "paragraphing" within blockquotes using <div class="p">, since the mobi reader always seems to terminate the blockquote at the first </p> that it finds rather than at the closing </blockquote>.

Snowman

[acprinter]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Do you like paragraph spaces on a large screen?

I like paragraph spaces on large screen small screen and on the printed page. After 30 years in a print shop printing books with paragraph spaces on all books we did it is what I like and what I am used to.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by acprinter

I like paragraph spaces on large screen small screen and on the printed page. After 30 years in a print shop printing books with paragraph spaces on all books we did it is what I like and what I am used to.

Obviously, I've never purchased any of the books you've printed as I would have had to return them. I just find paragraphs spaces ugly and it actually can through off the reading. especially when reading single line dialog or short paragraphs.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Snowman

I do most of my reading on my Cybook, and experimented for some time to find a font face and size, along with para indent and spacing that I was most comfortable with. I wanted it to look good (for me) primarily on the Cybook, with a PC screen as a secondary device.

I chose a couple of Roger Taylor's Hawklan Series books, since they are simply formatted with <p>text</p>, are nice and large, and I enjoy re-reading them. I found that on the whole I preferred the serif font family, with a font size of third or forth up from the smallest on the Cybook. I'm quite happy with the default 'Georgia' font, though I have tried others.

Having selected the font, I narrowed the spacing options down (using em's and %'s), then fine-tuned using px, to get to my current paragraph css settings, which are:

p { margin-top: 10px; text-indent: 25px; }
.p { margin-top: 10px; text-indent: 25px; }

The whole process took me about three weeks.

It would be good to be able to change these on the fly, as you can with justification (if it hasn't been forced), but I keep the source, so a minor edit at the top of the file along with a recompile is simple (and easily scriptable) should my reading preferences change.

The .p class, incidentally, is for "paragraphing" within blockquotes using <div class="p">, since the mobi reader always seems to terminate the blockquote at the first </p> that it finds rather than at the closing </blockquote>.

Snowman

This is what I really like with ePub. You can make it with your paragraph spaces and then I can go in after and fix it to remove them. So in that case, everyone is happy.

[Timoleon]

My preferences:
(a) pBooks --- no paragraph spacing.
(b) eBooks --- paragraph spacing on "larger" screens (prs505,iLiad, etc.)
(c) eBooks --- no paragraph spacing on smaller screens (iPod, Palm Tungsten, etc.)

I think each should be able to "roll their own" --- no hard-coding please!

[Ankh]

The recent aquisition of PRS505 and exposure to ePUB format, triggered, inevitably, a quest for a “perfect CSS”, for a perfect font for my reader. The Net is choke full of sites dedicated to the fine art of typography and type setting.

From what I saw, there is no definite answer to the “paragraph spacing versus indentation” issue. It falls, as far as I understood, into the (artistic) freedom of the one who defines the layout of the text, the one who produces the e-book or web page.

There are pseudo-rules or suggestions, though. It is either indentation, or paragraph spacing, never both. If paragraph spacing is used, the CSS examples that I saw work with rather small values, between 0.1 and 0.3 em. If indentation is employed, the first paragraph of the section is not indented (and “adjacent sibling selectors” in CSS are a must, which works fine on ADE version on PRS505).

As for the personal preferences of the end consumers, it is, IMHO, the defiiciency of our reading platforms, if we can not override the font used in text, change the paragraph spacing, or outright replace the whole setup with our own CSS.

It is not the autors or type setters that should catter to our personal preferences, it is Adobe, Sony who owe us a decent reading software.

My 2 cents.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Ankh

If indentation is employed, the first paragraph of the section is not indented (and “adjacent sibling selectors” in CSS are a must, which works fine on ADE version on PRS505).

Well, that depends on the specific way the CSS is applied. I usually have a class for the first paragraph of a section. And the "no indent in first paragraph" rule is not valid for all languages, in Spanish the first paragraph is indented, for instance.

It is not the autors or type setters that should catter to our personal preferences, it is Adobe, Sony who owe us a decent reading software.

Agree 100%.