Quote:
Originally Posted by cybmole
ok - so softbreak is not a workable idea - I admit I dont know much about softbreaks - I'd heard the term & i think have occasionally seen something in html code - <WBR> ?
|
Yes, but that's never been standardized. So it's definitely not part of XHTML, and so using it in EPUB will cause a validation failure. The hint is you always see it referred to as <WBR>, never <WBR/> :-P.
E-reader software is definitely _allowed_ to be smarter, at least by the latest draft specs. Note that if you're one of the few who use (at least the no longer maintained C version of) FBReader, it will break lines after an emdash.
Personally I hold the entire industry in contempt, including the epub spec writers, but hey, what's new. They haven't got basic justification right yet[1]. Hopefully as people address that mess (implementing hyphenation, for example), they'll realize there's a problem with emdash and it'll be sorted out eventually.
I did search this earlier, and found a hideous hack which is emitted by Word, exploiting the text direction specifications to allow breaking at a given point. But it didn't say that it works on e-readers (and given that ADE doesn't support text direction specified by HTML tags, it probably doesn't). So I'd suggest not doing that
.
[1] The original MobiPocket guidelines say not to specify justification / left alignment for body text; the e-reader should be able to decide. But both IDPF and Amazon dropped the ball.
Spoiler:
<RANT MODE ON>
As usual, Amazon have no excuse. If they're prepared to drop _paper_ books in protest at not being able to set _e_ book prices, they should have been quite prepared to require publishers to fix their ebook formatting. Instead they both caved in, and then forced the books which actually followed this beautiful guideline to always render as justified _despite not having implemented hyphenation_. Nor should Adobe have implemented "text-align: justify", given the lack of hyphenation, a user option, and any realistic possibility at all of correcting publisher's mistakes.
Smashwords are as bad you'd expect. Their formatting guide specifically says that some readers will prefer "ragged left", and some will prefer justification - then advises you to use ragged left - because Smashwords doesn't support the "let the e-reader decide" option. The best bit is not that practically no-one listens to this - every book I saw used went for justification instead - it's that _the formatting guide itself_ is justified. The html from FanFiction.Net is better formatted!
Apple may have put in more _technical effort_ than anyone else -- but they endorsed Smashwords output by reselling their books -- and later hacking around it in the reader. In theory their hacks are pretty sound, outside a few corner cases (including tables) -- but because they're hacks, they didn't bother to document what they do and why they exist, and again, _their own formatting guide doesn't follow their own rulings; it forces left alignment_. So they may have done as much damage as they saved their users for existing books. If you run up against these hacks, and then try to diagnose why it doesn't work to spec, you don't find concrete advice on what you're doing wrong and how to avoid problems. What you find are people flaming Apple and explaining how to work around the hacks by using completely bogus markup.