Google Play Books & Page Breaks

[Rand Brittain]

Is it just me or does Google Play Books ignore the use of the page-break-before styling?

Is there any way to get around this without using separate internal XHTML files?

[HarryT]

Use a different reading app? There are several excellent ePub apps around.

[Rand Brittain]

Well, sure, but I was looking to create a book and wanted to figure out how to get it to work.

[HarryT]

Are you saying that you're not using a separate HTML file per chapter? That's probably not a great idea; it is the convention in ePub books to have a separate file for each chapter.

I'm moving this thread to the ePub forum since you've now clarified that it's about ebook creation, not reading.

[mrmikel]

Is there some reason it must be one file?

[Toxaris]

The main reason why this is quite common is the HTML-filesize limit of the older devices of around 256k (a little bit more actually). However, also the newer reader that do not have that limit tend to really slow down with larger files.
Since a chapter is a kind of natural break, it is logical to make the splits there. I believe there are more readers that ignore the page-break-before setting.

[mrmikel]

The limit cited by Toxaris is also something to take into consideration as you place any footnotes, or links whose destination might either within the file or in another one.

Especially for the millions of machines already out there, repeated jumps out of the open file can take time, time which might be annoying to the reader and ameliorated to some extent by linking within the file whenever it makes sense. For instance, footnotes that link to a section at the end of the chapter instead of another file at the end of the book.

This may pose other issues, such as how do you skip over them easily, etc. But it is worthy of some thought nonetheless.

[Rand Brittain]

I use separate XHTML files for chapters, but it's a technical book and I formatted it with a large number of page-breaks when I arrived at an internal heading to keep them separate.

(The first book in the series used separate XHTML files for every break and there were about 300 internal XHTML files and Sigil needed about 3 minutes to open it. It was terrible.)

[mattmc]

I don't suppose anyone has concocted a way to get Google Play Books to respect page break CSS without separating the HTML files? As in, *any* way to do this without separate files?

[mattmc]

Originally Posted by mattmc

I don't suppose anyone has concocted a way to get Google Play Books to respect page break CSS without separating the HTML files? As in, *any* way to do this without separate files?

Hm, I take it back. I upgraded to the latest version of Google Play Books and it seemed to respect the page breaks CSS.

[odedta]

Originally Posted by mattmc

Hm, I take it back. I upgraded to the latest version of Google Play Books and it seemed to respect the page breaks CSS.

In any case, if you ever want to separate your HTML file easily use Calibre, it has an extremely easy separation tool (WYSIWYG).

[Notjohn]

Originally Posted by odedta

In any case, if you ever want to separate your HTML file easily use Calibre, it has an extremely easy separation tool (WYSIWYG).

As does Sigil.

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

As does Sigil.

Well, I must say that the splitting function of Calibre is much nicer. The one from Sigil is not really WYSIWYG. Not that I use the function or it would be interesting enough for me to switch from Sigil to Calibre, but fair is fair.