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Old 11-07-2012, 01:44 AM   #1
cybmole
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Question a blockquote / layout question

I see , in lots of retail epubs, a blockquote setting of left 2em, right 0em.
so when blockquote is used, typically to show a newspaper ,diary or book extract within the story, the text looks off to my eyes on an e-reader.
Sigil's increase indent changes only the left margin.

surely a blockquote would look better if centred i.e. with left and right margins both the same, or am I out of step with the universe here ?

is there some typesetting convention or medieval hangover that says shove all "extracts" text to the right , hard up to RH edge, via blockquotes ?

And if the blockquote is supposed to be a diary entry, storywise, or a handwritten letter, then surely it would be more authentic to have no paragraph indents , no justification, and more space between paragraphs. I don't recall the last time I wrote a paper letter but I'm pretty sure it would not have been fully justified

most ( though I admit, not all) retail books seem to use the same paragraph css class inside of the blockquote as they do outside. Is that laziness or typesetters 101 class training?
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Old 11-07-2012, 03:03 AM   #2
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If you're out of step with the universe, then so am I. I agree with you that even margins on both sides looks much better and that's the way I do it for blockquotes. Even on my 5" reader, there's no reason to not center the blockquote with even margins on each side... you don't need a huge indent on either side, just enough to set it off from the rest of the text. Quite often, the text for a diary entry or handwritten note is also italicized as well, and I'll often do both to match the original book.

Same when I run across the page with all the publishing dates and they just have it all left aligned. Pick up a book and that page is just about always centered, at least I've never run into one yet that wasn't centered. Yet a lot of ebooks are just left aligned for that page which looks like crap to me and I think is just lazy formatting.

Now if the thought is to make it acceptable on all reading devices, including cell phones, maybe there is some argument to just left indent. I'll test my epubs in various font sizes and styles, but I really don't worry at all about how it'll look on cell phones. They're just too small and I think you're going to end up with parts that look bad on a cell phone no matter how hard you try. So I'd rather go for good formatting for ereaders.

When I'm in doubt, I defer to how it looks in a real printed book.
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Old 11-07-2012, 03:09 AM   #3
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I don't know the history, but I will say that it could be the MOBI format has something to do with it (particularly if the book was a conversion from mobi). Since MOBI has no right-margin capability, and will format the document internally with blockquote.
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Old 11-07-2012, 04:25 AM   #4
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I checked an old out print book I did recently in epub, and then converted to mobi with Calibre, and the text is indented on both sides in the mobi file as it is in the epub. So it must have some ability for right margins. Or was it that when mobi files first came out they didn't have any right-margin capability back then? That might explain it.
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Old 11-07-2012, 04:46 AM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kiwidude View Post
I don't know the history, but I will say that it could be the MOBI format has something to do with it (particularly if the book was a conversion from mobi). Since MOBI has no right-margin capability, and will format the document internally with blockquote.
well the sigil button for increase indent's default value may also play a small part

it could well be that I'm seeing it a lot in free Kindle book conversions, but I'm sure I could dig up genuine retail epub examples also - pretty sure the recent humblebundle collection contained some examples.

Maybe folks authoring for both kindle & mobi opt for something that works in both?

I expect Hitch will be along shortly & wil tell us how it should be done
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Old 11-07-2012, 05:44 AM   #6
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Originally Posted by Ripplinger View Post
Or was it that when mobi files first came out they didn't have any right-margin capability back then?

Older mobi had no right margin control. The newer kf8 (which Calibre implemented a few months back) does.
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Old 11-07-2012, 02:26 PM   #7
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Using CSS for a blockquote will allow you to fix it to whatever you want, left justification, right margin etc.
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Old 11-07-2012, 02:47 PM   #8
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To be honest, I don't like the wasted screen real-estate caused by using left AND right margins on large blocks of text. In Mobi or ePub. Using both's OK for epigraphs and quotations at the beginnings of chapters—or for songs and poetry, but if it's a letter-type situation (or other special blocks of text) that just need special formatting in order to indicate that "hey, something's different here"... I'm almost always going to use left margin only and maximize the words/per line by leaving the right-margin "0".

But as always ... to each their own.

Last edited by DiapDealer; 11-07-2012 at 02:56 PM.
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Old 11-08-2012, 02:02 AM   #9
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to me, if it's not symmetrical it looks wrong somehow. I don't have enough paper novels to hand to skim for how it is usually done in print versions.

I focus my "wasted screen estate " annoyance on unnecessary top margins & supersized chapter headers.

>daleDe: I know CSS can fix it, I guess I'm fed up of having to tweak other peoples defaults before I can enjoy the book!
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Old 11-09-2012, 01:28 AM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cybmole View Post
well the sigil button for increase indent's default value may also play a small part

it could well be that I'm seeing it a lot in free Kindle book conversions, but I'm sure I could dig up genuine retail epub examples also - pretty sure the recent humblebundle collection contained some examples.

Maybe folks authoring for both kindle & mobi opt for something that works in both?

I expect Hitch will be along shortly & wil tell us how it should be done
Oh, lord, if that's who I've become, I'll shut up now.

In mobi, pre-K8, you couldn't do bq's at all, (not a "real" blockquote), and you couldn't do right-margin indents. As a matter of screenspace, we still tend to do a left-indent-only paragraph to indicate something set aside from the narrative. When the average screensize is only 3 net inches in width, it just seems wasteful to use up a lot of space for L-R indents. (And think of the people--not a few--who rotate the devices like Fire and NookColor and read in two-column mode!).

However, that being said, sure, aesthetically, given my druthers, I like nice symmetrical bq's, also. As humans, we're programmed to love symmetry. {shrug}. Look at all the people we think are "beautiful," and most are highly symmetric in face and body. It's just the nature of the beast. ;-)

H
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Old 11-09-2012, 01:34 AM   #11
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thanks for input - what about the "make handwritten notes look handwritten" issue - do you / your clients have a view on that ?

I originally asked
....And if the blockquote is supposed to be a diary entry, storywise, or a handwritten letter, then surely it would be more authentic to have no paragraph indents , no justification, and more space between paragraphs
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Old 11-09-2012, 02:14 AM   #12
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Originally Posted by cybmole View Post
thanks for input - what about the "make handwritten notes look handwritten" issue - do you / your clients have a view on that ?

I originally asked
....And if the blockquote is supposed to be a diary entry, storywise, or a handwritten letter, then surely it would be more authentic to have no paragraph indents , no justification, and more space between paragraphs
LOL, many of my (younger-as-authors) clients certainly have a view on it, and it's not one I generally share. (My personal crusade against handwriting-font "abuse.")

I don't think I understand why you think no paragraph indents would be appropriate? Most people still write with indented paragraphs, rather than block-style, so I don't think I follow why you think it would be "more authentic?" Or, for that matter, more space between paragraphs?

Personally, I like whitespace, above and below, and enclosing quotation marks, above the date or salutation and after the closing. Iif needed--if the entry/element extends past the average screensize--then I'll usually think about an indent, so that when the reader comes to the end, the change, coupled with the whitespace, makes the return to the narrative obvious. This is particularly true with very long "letters." Obviously, font-sizes affect this, and we can't control all things, as we all know well.

We just did a book that was an absolute horror--I don't know how on earth the book was originally created, but it was a series of letters "on" a particular person, so "about" John Doe. Somehow, they'd been concatenated into a imaged, not searchable, PDF file--some were xeroxes, some were typed from the originals, etc. These letters are on a modern person, so the image-only part boggles me. To get it done, the book was scanned by Golden Images, with a manual proof, so that part was okay, but the layout was egregiously bad (in the original, not blaming Stan at GI). We did everything we could, as it was also a super-RUSH gig, but crappity, it was just unreadable.

I would have vastly preferred to have a specific style for each letter, but the publisher was unwilling, insisting on a variety of styles (the original "formats" of the original letters, even if they'd been retyped for the book), and for the life of me, nothing I said penetrated. The only way to 'recognize' one letter from the next is by scrolling up-down, to find the salutation or closing, or date.

In reviewing that book, I'd have to say that it was a classic case of two opposing goals--visually, the book would have benefited greatly by indentation for the letters, so you always knew that you were reading one; but as the entire book was mostly letters, you'd have wasted a boatload of space, thus risking pissing off the readers thereof. That particular publisher also had a cow about the idea of the footnotes not being "with" the letters--despite repeated explanations--so we ended up having to put the footnotes beneath each letter, essentially in the body of the "chapter." I still don't think that s/he understood that screens are small.

I certainly don't think that losing the indents, or adding more whitespace between paragraphs would have helped that book. I think it would have made it even more confusing, and harder to scroll up/down to see where you were, or what letter you were reading. I also believe, when I contemplate the small screens of the average devices, that the visual "cue" of adding whitespace between the paragraphs of a "letter" or diary entry, etc., could easily be confused with a scenebreak, particularly if you used bock paragraph style, as the current layout trends are whitespace and a block paragraph for scene changes or POV changes.

Just my $.02. I think that as long as the book conveys the story without confusing the reader, the formatter or layout person has done his or her job; I think we can reasonably expect that the Layout Police won't come knockin' as long as the book makes sense.

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Old 11-09-2012, 02:44 AM   #13
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I spend ages trying to recall how I'd been taught to write - it's been so long since I wrote a (paper) letter - & I could not test myself to see what indenting comes naturally without thinking about what I "should" do ( the "don't think of an elephant " issue.. )

I did avoid putting my foot in it re newspaper extracts, I was all set to claim that printed newspapers use no indents + big paragraph spaces ( like they do online) but then I found a paper one...

I think that just leaves the question of fully justified. Handwritten notes will never be justified like proper typesetting but whether that should be replicated in a novel I am unsure. I don't like seeing ragged right margins, even though I just made a case for having them!

I like the printed book trick of changing font family for the "handwritten" bits but that'a pain to reproduce in e-books across a range of readers, I know.

I have another mild peeve where sections of text are italicised but then a word within that section is un-italicised for emphasis. I think that's ugly. but don't have an alternative to propose. I'm not sure if that happens in printed books but I've seen it in many e-books

Last edited by cybmole; 11-09-2012 at 02:46 AM.
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Old 11-09-2012, 03:40 AM   #14
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I have another mild peeve where sections of text are italicised but then a word within that section is un-italicised for emphasis. I think that's ugly. but don't have an alternative to propose. I'm not sure if that happens in printed books but I've seen it in many e-books
That exact situation just happened to me in the last old book I scanned. There were 5 short chapters dealing with the origin of an item in various times as early as 300 A.D. The entire content of those chapters was italicized, and certain items were in normal text, such as ship names, some titles, things that would normally have been italicized if in normal text.

I didn't like the look of it either and at first assumed the OCR just read it wrong, but it was really like that in the book. I opted to keep it as the original book was written. So if some long dead typesetter made a huge error, I just did too.
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Old 11-09-2012, 06:35 AM   #15
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Sorry Hitch

I keep hearing a repeating theme: small, 3" Screen

Grab your Pica stick and a mass market paperback.

Measure a line of text in a normal chapter (margin to Margin): 3.375" inches
If you don't Add extra Margins (the device Bezel/mask, is the 'built in' margins).
That is not much difference in width from Billions of dead tree books sold here in the USA
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