@GeoffR,
Thanks for the detailed reply. I can see your point, especially when opening paragraphs have indents. As this is one of my pet hates, I have a compulsive need to fix epubs styled this way, so this could be why it hasn't bothered me so much so far. The act of turning the page and seeing a non-indented paragraph may also be enough of a subtle mental break to register that the scene has changed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by murg
Scene breaks should be something like:
<p class="centre">* * *</p>
or
<p class="centre">———</p> |
The problem with this approach, if designing a book to be good for Kobo users, is that many choose to read their epubs as kepubs and if they also like to use the Kobo's Justification button to force left- or full-justification then the carefully prepared centred asterisks will also be forced to the left (
which looks really ugly IMO). If you want them to remain centred you'd need to leave the Justification button set to Off.
An alternative is to use the Kobo Patcher to stop the default forced justification (
kepub only) of <p> and <div> tags, but most Kobo users probably won't. Not to mention that unless you've styled your epub/kepub well it may create as many problems as it fixes.
I suppose a pragmatic (
but dubious) workaround may be to code the asterisks (
or whatever) with a header tag, e.g.
Code:
<h6>* * *</h6>
h6 {font-size: 1em; margin:1em 0; text-align:center; text-indent:0}
rather than <p> or <div> but I'm pretty sure that would be considered Very Bad Practice by HTML purists
At least if you use a 'whitespace method' such as big margin-top/padding-top or <p> </p> then you don't have to worry about your centring going AWOL. I'm not really a fan of the 'non-breaking space method' as I've had them silently stripped by both Sigil and calibre at various times in the past. Although, to be fair, I think both programs have fixed this problem in their current incarnations. Only my paranoia remains.
In conclusion, I think I'm relieved I'm cleaning up epubs/kepubs for personal consumption rather than trying to design them for the world at large
