Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor
The problem is that everyone disagrees over whether these are bugs or not. As far as I can tell, the line height, orphans and widows and margins seem to be working according to the CSS and epub specs. Doing something else would get complaints in other ways.
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From the use case perspective not applying the setting the user defines (in the menu) for margins, line spacing and fonts with ebooks containing css styles clearly is a bug. This could be fixed in two ways: (1) notify the user that the book prevents changes or (2) override the book settings.
Doing just plain NOTHING if the user applies changes via the respective menu is a bug since you can't expect the user to know whether an ebook has inbuilt css styles nor that the reader will always 'respect' these (thereby not respecting the user's ideas about how the book should be displayed).
As for the windows and orphans settings: while awkward defaults may technically not qualify as a bug the default settings are a major annoyance to many people. (Another example are the hyphenation settings for some languages). And it does not matter who recommends these defaults. Could be easily solved by just making these settings a user definable option.
From a design-philosophy point of view: It should be fairly easy to implement a global option for the user to switch between 'book defined' and user defined rendering settings. That would serve both 'camps' just fine. The 'unconditionally respect the book defined styles'-argument - in my opinion - unnecessarily sacrifices a major advantage of an e-reading device, namely the possibility to adjust things to your liking.
Reading through user opinions here shows that it is not possible to please everybody at the same time unless there are options to adapt the book display to each individual's liking.