Quote:
Originally Posted by exaltedwombat
Interesting! My Kindle's an early one, not sure if it's the very first model, but it was bought to test my very first Sigil-based attempts at constructing ebooks, and I don't think it's ever minded <br />
Anyway, Hitch will know.
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Geeeze, your confidence
shames me. Man, I've slept since then. I was about to post something along the lines of, "I don't remember," but DNSB is correct (collect your winnings here!); early Kindles--the millions of 'em still out there--can go utterly wonk on using the break tag. I have some vague recollection of doing almost exactly what the OP did, using <br/> throughout some book of poetry, and having the whole thing go TangoUniform on me, on some reader (was it K4PC? Maybe it was also K4iOS?). That was traumatizing, and back then, my regex-fu was even worse than it is now, so I ended up doing the whole thing with a line-by-line regex, more or less. {sigh}.
I can't even say that it's all fine now. I mean...every day, I get an email from someone, who's looking at their book in "Reader X." Now, I posted some weeks back about someone who used some e-reader I've never even HEARD OF (trust me: that takes some doing), and her mobi file looked like the back end of a drowned abandoned animal. It was dreadful. I mean, DREADFUL. She was sending her layout person (this was one of our subcontracing gigs, wherein we are the secret "ebook experts" they employ) shrieky emails. And the book was positively GAWJUS in every sort of normal reader, even Calibre, but this thing...it was just HORRID. I don't even know how she FOUND this damned software.
Honestly...trying to ensure that every book works on EVERY POSSIBLE READER is the way to the madhouse. It really is. Yes, you can make a book vanilla enough so that it will never look utterly lousy, but...it's hard enough as it is to keep bookmakers happy and working, because truth be told, they get bored as crap. I mean, let's face it; this is detailed, tedious, highly-repetitive work with little in the way of pleasant surprises; they're always
horrible surprises. (I took in an "ePUB-fix," for a book that was mostly made with Calibre, and the bookmaker who has it is still not speaking to me. Seriously.) Allowing/letting them add beauty to books is the only way to keep them happy, rather than chaining them to desks and feeding them bread and water.
That's why I say, try to stick to what works in the "big" readers: Kindles, Nook, ADE, Sony, Kobo, and yes, even iBooks. And Readium, which I use moderately often for previewing, etc. Obviously, browser-based, FFePUBReader, too. My feeling is, if a book works on all of those, you're reasonably safe. Also, use what's demonstrably viable (like paragraph tags instead of breaks). That's my $.02, FWIW.
Hitch