Quote:
Originally Posted by AaronShep
That's an easy one.  If calibre is inserting paragraphs with only nonbreaking spaces to produce vertical spacing, that won't work anymore. Kindle Format X is ignoring nonbreaking spaces, treating them as regular spaces instead. And to the browser software that the Kindle uses for basic rendering, a paragraph with only a space in it has no content and is no paragraph at all. So, the whole thing is just omitted. You need to use CSS for margin-bottom instead.
This is the kind of thing that makes KFX such a devil. None of the regular proofing methods will show you this new treatment of nonbreaking spaces, so it won't show up until weeks after publication, when the file is reprocessed for Enhanced Typesetting. And by that time, you're not likely to be paying attention. I doubt there's any ebook software out there that has yet caught up to these changes.
Aaron |
I don't see the non-breaking space issue as a tragedy, myself. I've always felt that ebook makers who use paragraphs with only non-breaking spaces (or a non-breaking space followed by a br tag) for vertical spacing were shooting themselves in the foot all along. This change just confirms that.
Besides, they're (Amazon) not the first to have renderers that ignored empty paragraphs (or paragraphs with only an nbsp). That's why the nbsp followed by a br tag convention came into play in the first place (and so long ago).
They never had a format that rendered identically across all their devices and apps anyway. Publishers, creators and selfpubbers will survive this change too. They always do. It's always involved a lot of work planning and implementing a coding strategy to achieve similar rendering on the widest possible range of devices and apps (and formats) without resorting to maintaining 14 different versions of your ebook. This doesn't really change that.
And if it forces people to start using css for vertical spacing (like they should have been doing all along), I'm all for it. Makes it exponentially easier for the person [Hi Hitch!] that's eventually going to get called in to fix it all, at some point down the road, anyway!