[Psymon]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Just so I'm on the record:

Any possibility that we can all agree that we should NOT be using "px" to set vertical whitespace elements? Ems or % would really, really work better

Okay, you sold me (with your more detailed explanation re smaller devices further on in your reply). I'd been using ems before to create whitespace -- which I'd switched to from using empty paragraphs previous to that, but it was actually your recommendation, Hitch, to not do that which got me to switch to using ems -- but then I found that if I use ems, if a person increases the font size, then that only adds even more whitespace up at the top which only adds to the possibility of things like title pages overflowing onto the next page. And yes, I know I can't prevent that from happening all the time, but I don't have to exacerbate it happening either.

And so that's why I switched to px -- but I see your point, of course.

Pardon me for being slow, but how would I set the whitespace on my title page, or at the beginning of chapters, to be, say, 15% of the screen height? I'm thinking "padding-top:15%", but to me that would only serve to add 15% of the line height.

And all this, over the "blank page" (that doesn't exist), that's created, on the fly if/when the reader sizes the font in such a way, and uses font X instead of font y, and IF s/he has the iPad rotated to read in two-page/column mode...honestly, why all the drama?

Because contrary to the way you design books, Hitch, for the books I design, design matters. I'm not being critical of the design of your books -- in fact, I've never seen one before -- but rather I'm just going from what you say, both here in this reply as well as numerous times elsewhere in other threads.

Here's the thing: no matter how typographically perfect we want to make our work, they are NOT. PRINT. Books. Trying to force two pages to be on the left- and right-hand "pages" of a reader that may/mayn't be rotated in landscape, may/mayn't have font X, etc....What happens if you have a sight-impaired user who cranks up the font size, with that 42px "top-margin?" what happens THEN?

I'm fully aware that ebooks aren't print -- this is a lesson I learned two decades ago when I got into designing web pages. By your reasoning, all web pages would/should look pretty plain (if not lousy and boring), too, in an effort to make sure that they "work" correctly for everyone -- but that's a ridiculous argument. There's no reason that a website can't be functional and practical cross-platform and cross-browser, AND look beautiful as well, and while I'm still a beginner at this ebook publishing thing, it's immediately obvious to me that this is the case with ebooks, too.

I can see that that's not very practical if you're in this as a business, where clients want a reasonable product that works all-around, but don't want it to cost a fortune in time and money to have done, but just as we have livres d'artistes with print publishing, why can't we have e-livres d'artistes, too?

Just because you don't want to do it, doesn't mean I can't -- indeed, your repeatedly telling me that I shouldn't (if not that I "can't") only makes me want to do it even more.

We can be as artistic as we want, but we also need to accept what eBooks do well, and what they do NOT. A lot of what gets talked about (page break here, page-break before:, page-break after, etc.) doesn't work on all readers.

In what contexts does that page-break code "break", i.e. not work, not be recognized?

And is that an argument for going back to what I had before, i.e. using separate XML files for wherever I want those page breaks to appear?

When I was doing web design, especially in the 1990s when everything was all still so new, I would incorporate things that weren't always backwards-compatible, but everything is moving/changing so fast that I added them in anyway, knowing that it was only a matter of a few (if not one or two) short years before the technology would catch up, and only a matter of time beyond that where people would be dumping their old hardware in place of newer, better, faster computers.

Wouldn't it be safe/safer to assume that page-break will in time be quite universally recognized in virtually all devices? I mean all new/forthcoming devices, of course.

And the "extra page thing?" Again: it's only relevant when someone is reading in LANDSCAPE mode. You know how often I see someone reading in landscape mode? NEVER. I mean it: NEVER. It's time to embrace the GOOD, and learn to GRACEFULLY live with the other.

Hey, wait a sec, you can't have it both ways! You keep pooh-poohing some ideas here and there because "What about this scenario?!?!", well, I could probably also say "I never see a vision-impaired person reading an ebook with the font size set to GIANT, so why should I pay attention to your caveat about that possibility, Hitch?"

Well, because it's a possibility, of course -- and as far as viewing ebooks in landscape mode goes, I actually prefer to read them that way myself, and "NEVER" read them in portrait. In fact, I really miss the old "faux book" viewing mode in iBooks that they had before, I thought it was wonderful to read an ebook and have it "look like a book" (in that way). I can't understand why they got rid of that, for me (and others I've talked to about it) it was such a nice feature.

But I digress...

Sorry to get off on a tear, but at the very least, let's try to avoid using PX for positioning in REFLOWABLE BOOKS.

Gotcha on that one, and look forward to hearing your (or anyone's) response to my question about that, above.

It is interesting, though, this realization that I think I've made about how I see ebook design. I can understand how most of you out there view ebooks as being "books" converted to epub (or whatever) format, and all the possibilities -- and limitations -- that that brings in. For me, though, what I "see" with ebook design, as I'm designing them, is web pages converted to epub (or, perhaps, books converted to web pages, then converted to epubs).

I see a whoooooooole world (if not universe) of possibilities in there as far as creating something visually appealing -- if not, indeed, beautiful -- goes, and I only need to figure out which of those aspects from my two decades of website design and graphic design experience (and making beautiful sites that work cross-browser, cross-platform, etc.) I can bring into the somewhat more limited ebook publishing world.

Where you say "You can't", Hitch, I say "I can" -- and y'know what? I not only can, I do.