Quote:
Originally Posted by Anak
The problem for the broken code that Kobo inserts in its kepubs is that it breaks intended (deliberate and logical; I used a scene break as an example, but there are many more) book formatting which was carefully designed by the publisher.
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A lot of the eBook formatting is so far off from
carefully designed. They are actually a right mess. I've done a lot of reformatting and what I've started with sometimes is a horrible mess. That's just the coding. Some the formatting is bad to start with. How they get away selling that is just wrong. They should be made to properly format eBooks. But they don't. They use the same sort of messy CSS and bad design styles/choices. There is nothing careful about it. If you've ever seen some of what I started with and what I ended up with, you'd be surprised at the differences.
We have issues like excessive margins, excessive indents, no indents, paragraph spaces that are too large, text set to start off quite small. offset text that is set to x-small or other just as bad font sizes, large wasted space for charter titles and other section headers/titles, poorly chosen fonts for embedding that do not work well with eInk, not enough space for a section break, some text set for left justify and some for full justify, spaces around em dashes, spaces around ellipse, simulated blockquotes with left/right margins too big and sometimes top/bottom margins too big and sometimes no right margin offset so it looks as bad as Mobi, incorrect encoding, and there are other issues. But to say this mess is
carefully designed is doing a disservice to those who do know how to correctly format eBooks.
Carefully designed is the exception, not the norm.