Quote:
Originally Posted by jackie_w
I fear you have an over-simplistic view of how epub css styling works. Overriding styles selectively with 100% success for every epub is just not possible (at least in 2013). There are too many idiotic ways in which epub creators create the css styling and markup the html text content. There are currently only 2 ways to guarantee the precise styling you want.
The first is to manually tweak the internal css for every epub. It works perfectly but is a total PITA because it's time-consuming and you have to learn stuff.
The other way is for the reading app to completely ignore internal css and let the user set everything from the device. This may sound terrific -- and it is for some people. FBReader and CoolReader can do this, both apps work on the PocketBook range of e-ink readers and all Android devices. What frequently happens with this approach (unless things have improved in the last couple of years) is that, depending on the epub, some display features get lost, and no amount of customisation on the reader can reproduce them e.g scenebreaks, centre- and right-alignment, text indented on both sides, inline font-size changes (small-caps & dropcaps). This can be very irritating to those who like their epubs 'just-so'.
Everything else is a compromise somewhere between the two extremes -- and compromises never suit all of the people all of the time.
|
Which is why I think the ereader should give the reader two options - (1) leave the stylesheet as per the ebook, for those types of books that have the centre alignment, drop caps, etc, as you describe and (2) complete customization as per FBReader, for example, for those of us that mainly read novels and don't care about having things "just so". Wouldn't that be the closest to the best of both worlds? As you say, this is 2013, where computer animation is detailed down to individual strands of hair, and we are simply talking about text displayed on a page.