Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
NEVER EVER use margins that are not fixed. 5% is not fixed and the will be different with different screen sizes. Also, 5% is huge, It's a worthless margin. The way to do is is 5px. That's an acceptable left/right margin. But with 5%, a new version of this book will hve to be made to fix this. Sorry to have to be so harsh, but this needs to be pointed out big time as it is a major mistake.
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Well, I think it looks nice. I found small pixel margins to be too close to the edge of the device (and not pleasurable FOR ME
).
Also, I like that I have the blockquotes at 10% (double the left/right margins of the book). I also think that this looks pleasurable on any screen size. (I originally did most of my EPUB reading on a 22" PC Monitor... none of these tablets can get much larger than that).
I found that if you use some sort of pixel margins for those, on a small device the margins will look too big, and on a large device, the margins will look too small. Having them double looks extremely pleasurable (again, TO ME).
I have also tested this on something as small as a cell phone (the 5% margins are small), I have done a ton of reading on my Nook (the 5% margins look great there too), and I still do a lot of reading on my PC (the 5% margins also look fantastic there).
I have also found with a lot of these newer devices, even if you do pick Publisher Defaults, you are still able to override with your own margin decisions (unless I am mistaken? I haven't messed around with a newer ereader in a LONG time). So something like iBooks/Marvin/Mantano will still allow you to adjust the margins without having to go into the CSS and tweak it.
Can't satisfy every single person with the default CSS, but this is why the reading programs/devices are now allowing you to adjust a lot of these settings (so I sort of see it as a non-problem if you make the default CSS pleasurable enough). I think the reading devices themselves are going to only get MORE customizable from here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AuthorGreg
I never thought designing an ePub would be akin to rocket science, but boy what a great divide it can cause. I bought books on how to design ePubs from Amazon. I won't bother to mention the author names, but after having fully consumed those volumes I still wasn't able to produce an ePub that could survive Nook Press's version of a "meatgrinder."
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Yeah, I mentioned this in our emails back and forth... a lot of the information in these books becomes outdated as the submission sites change/get updated/get worse... and some weird code which may have worked perfectly fine BACK THEN (for example, maybe that "reset code" worked at some point in the past), it will break and cause you headaches NOW.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AuthorGreg
Tex showed me the way, though, and I'm very grateful. So if the worst of his code's shortcomings is the left and right margin settings, I'm good with that. I change two values in the CSS file and that's that.
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Indeed.. that is the beauty of CSS.. you can easily go in and tweak it to how you want! And I made sure to make it easy for YOU to understand/personally maintain this CSS in the future. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy!
Quote:
Originally Posted by AuthorGreg
Thanks to everyone for tolerating my persistence in this thread. I believe we all need to think about how to make this easier. Tex's code is easy to comprehend for me. HE should write a book.
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Thank you.... but I think I will stick to helping on these forums.... writing tutorials is a ton of work, and writing a book... now THAT would take some time (especially with how in-depth/didactic I like to go).
