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Originally Posted by melchizedek
I'm curious: I bought an epub book yesterday and was sad to see it was atrociously formatted. Unnecessary spaces between every paragraph, random breaks in text mid-sentence, no paragraph indenting, etc. I was considering sending it back, but I really wanted the book, so I decided to manually edit it using Sigil.
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Spaces between paragraphs and no paragraph indenting? Well, the first thought occurs to me that it could be a style sheet issue (standard html skips a line between paragraphs and does not indent (which is actually a short hand for skipping a line) unless a style sheet overrides that and since an ePub xml is built on top of html...). The breaks in mid-sentence seems to suggest that somehow or other your reader was either ignoring the mark-up tags or that somehow a literal tag was set.
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First, I stripped out the DRM. I then loaded it into Calibre -- just to make sure the DRM had been removed -- and to my surprise, the book was correctly formatted. The spaces were gone, as were the breaks in text, and the paragraph indentations were back.
My question is: has anyone known this happen before, and is it possible that DRM actually screws up the formatting of books? For reference, I tried the original DRM file in my ereader, in Adobe digital editions, and in Kobo's own reading app, and the formatting was rubbish in all three. I removed the DRM... it was perfect in all three.
Any thoughts?
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This is all very weird. I could see DRM accidentally corrupting a style sheet, but stripping DRM off should not in any way shape or form restore that corrupted style sheet.
I suppose there could be some really weird bug in Adobe's software to decrypt the file that resulted in the book ignoring the style sheets. Only way to be sure would be if I could see the raw uncompressed files.
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Bill