Using the width attribute

[crutledge]

I have been following the thread on The Complete Guide to Formatting Books for the Amazon Kindle by Joshua Tallent. He said that he had come up with a method of formatting poetry.

HarryT commented that he used the width attribute for that purpose. This caught my attention. I suspect that both use the same method.

I have tried using the width attribute and it has never worked for me.

Example:
<p width="-15">... <div width="-15">...

I am obviously doing something wrong but haven't isolated my problem.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks,
Charlie

[Nate the great]

I just checked, and I'm using it the same way:

<p width="-20">

If you're checking your work in a browser, it won't show. The width attribute is nonstandard.

[HarryT]

Yes, it only shows up in the finished Mobi book. I generally use 1em for each "level" of indentation. That looks right to me, although others may of course feel otherwise.

I'm not using negative (hanging) indents, but positive ones. Eg, picking a little verse at random:

Mary had a little lamb
    its fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went
    the lamb was sure to go.

Then I'd do that in a Mobi book like this:

<div>Mary had a little lamb,</div>
<div width="1em">its fleece was white as snow.</div>
<div>And everywhere that Mary went,</div>
<div width="1em">the lamb was sure to go.,</div>

and that will indent the 2nd and 4th lines by an amount which looks good to me. In a web browser, however, you won't see the indents.

[crutledge]

Nate,
Thank you very much. The browser is the way I test everything. Know of a good non-standard browser?
Charlie

[Nate the great]

I finally had time today to experiment, and I found a better way to do the hanging indent. Here is an example that works with MobiCreator and uses standards compliant attributes:

<style type="text/css">
p.hanging {
margin-left:00;
text-indent:-20;
}
</style>

This code fragment is supposed to go in the file header (between the head tags). I stronly urge you to use it instead of the width attribute.

P.S. It works in a browser, too.

[crutledge]

Nate,
This way looks great. This will force me to learn style sheets as I've really had no need for them before. I assume that the code can be named and used as a Class attribute for <p> and <div>. By adjusting margin-left and text-indent, lines of poetry could be indented to various levels and any word wrap will be correct.

You, sir, are an HTML expert.
Charlie

P.S. It beats the heck out of the poetry method in the book!!!

[Nate the great]

If you look over in the Advanced Ebook Formatting Tips thread, it turns out I was wrong about margin-left. It's ignored by MobiCreator. I'd still leave it in just in case you use the same source files to make another format which can use it.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

If you look over in the Advanced Ebook Formatting Tips thread, it turns out I was wrong about margin-left. It's ignored by MobiCreator. I'd still leave it in just in case you use the same source files to make another format which can use it.

Can I ask if I may whether you have tried the same document in Calibre? I know that there are some differences in the way that Mobipocket Creator and Calibre deal with HTML, and one of my ambitions is to be able to collect a list of the differences.

Unless we check things like this we won't know whether the problems lie with Mobipocket as a format, or with Mobipocket Creator.

Regards, Alex

[HarryT]

All you can do in a Mobi book is to set "global" margins for the entire book:

http://www.mobipocket.com/dev/articl...le=margins.htm

You cannot vary the margins for specific parts of the book.