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Originally Posted by JSWolf
If I am not mistaken, a blockquote's default margins is 1.2em top/bottom and 42px left/right.
What I use is 1em top/bottom and 1.5 or 2em left/right. For a blockquote, em is OK. It's left/right and top/bottom margins (for the entire screen) should be fixed. If you have a 6" eInk screen, 5% will give a certain margin. On an iPad, a 5% margin will be larger. top/bottom & left/right margins should always be fixed. If the purpose of the margins is to prevent the text from betting up against the side of the screen/bezel/window then you don't need a large margin. For that sort of margin, I've seen 5-9pt used and that works without being too big for most people. I know some (myself included) like the margins as small as possible.
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AFAIK, B&N actually stipulates, I believe, that L&R margins have to be set in pix/pts. I'd have to go check, but I think that's right. This is for the page/screen, not blockquotes. I believe we use ems internally for any type of indentation or blockquotes, generally.
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Oh, in some ePub, the blockquote is simulated. The publisher does not use a true blockquote. The use multiple classes to do the simulation. And sometimes, they don't bother to set a right margin. This is a holdover from Mobipocket on the Kindle and it's very bad practice. So I go into the CSS and fix the simulated blockquotes to have proper margins instead of the sometimes mess of margins they use. Heck, I've even seen 5% left/right margins on a simulated blockquote. And I do make sure there right margin matches the left margin because I do want things to look good. Mobipocket style blockquotes look awful.
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Wolfie:
For production houses, many only do what will work. We've used an indent at times on the left-hand-side
only for some books, simply because the pain of explaining the issue about right-hand-margins to a client when they got the e-ink version of the book was more aggravation than it's worth. This was generally 2009-10, maybe 11. Nowadays, of course, using a blockquote is simplicity because you can specify a fall-back for the K7 devices, but let us not forget, t'was not ever so. You may well see books made even as recently as 2009 that still only use a left-margin. {shrug}.
I had a client this week who's in a snit because we made a book for him in 2011, using certain elements/images. Poet, of course. His new book doesn't look like his old book, because much of what we did then, that suited the K7 einks, won't work now, particularly with the HD screens (having to do with a repeating image). He sent me a very snotty email, telling me he was going to turn in a Proof sheet, and
demand that my crew download the archived file from 2011 and
instruct them to make the new book to match. I had to write back and tell him, "listen, it's your choice, but here's what it's going to look like, which is why we chose to make this this way, as X (one of my staffers) has tried to explain to you in the last four emails about this."
What we did worked
then. There wasn't anything "wrong" with it.
Today, it would be sloppy bookmaking, and it would not work with all the myriad devices flying around, and certainly not with the hi-rez screens. {shrug}. Things change, Wolfie. You gotta stop being so black-and-white about everything. Time alters perceptions, memories,
and procedures. When you look at a book and think that the bookmaker made it 'wrongly,' or used a left-hand-only blockquote, you have to look at when the book was made, to put the building into context.
Hitch