Quote:
Originally Posted by jackie_w
It was actually Nick I meant to address, rather than yourself. Sorry I didn't make that clear  However...
It was as if the whole css file was missing, not just a single style rule, namely:
- all text left-aligned (incl headings which should have been centred)
- all paragraphs separated by a blank line (i.e. margin-top & margin-bottom 1em)
- no paragraphs indented.
See this post, in the Kobo Driver thread, where I first mentioned it. I don't know the full whys and wherefores but it was during the great debate about 'all Kobo's line spacing settings are too big' ( before the Kobo Patcher came along and made that problem go away). I hadn't used the p {line-height: 1.0 !important} in any calibre conversion Prefs settings, but in the Kobo Driver's "Modify CSS" option, which would just have copied that style rule, verbatim, to the bottom of each epub css file during send-to-device.
With that negative experience I've stayed away from !important ever since. But I don't know why that simple addition was so destructive to the styling.
As that post was from August 2013 (several fw versions ago), for interest, I just tried it again to see if anything had changed -- same result. However it's quite possible that !important is less destructive when used in other circumstances. Who knows? 
Oh, yes, it wouldn't be perfect. Some books may have some of their detailed styling spoiled (e.g. headings, dropcaps). But that may be a lesser-of-two-evils option in order to have all the standard body text paragraphs spaced to taste and which can be achieved with a mass epub-epub conversion using the Look&Feel - Filter option with line-height.
The only perfect solution is to hand-edit every epub to add/remove line-heights where they need to be added/removed. Most people aren't prepared to do that - and who can blame them?
The trouble with hard-coding specific line-height values in all your epubs is that any given value will only look good with some font families and will look terrible with others. If you only ever read with one font, now and forever more, perhaps this won't ever be a problem, but if you like to vary fonts and use a variety of reading devices and reader apps then the less hard-coded settings the better IMHO. Trying to future-proof epubs is tricky . |
I don't spend a lot of time getting optimal appearance. Most books are better than reasonable and I just add my own preferences for indentation, justification and spacing.
I only read books once so not worth a lot of time unless I really want to read an ugly book
and this happens seldom these days as most come pretty good already.
I have been thinking I would like to have the same base font size for body text for all book, and playing around occasionally, but what works for some doesn't work for all it seems. Probably lack of knowledge on may part.
I find the subject interesting, but am not prepared to spend a lot of time on a regular basis fine tuning when I am just reading that book once for several hours at most. Just lazy I guess.
Helen