Quote:
Originally Posted by Notjohn
Anyone who has read many e-books must be accustomed to those occasional short pages
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You can get used to anything; it doesn't make it right, and it shouldn't prevent us from trying to do better.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Notjohn
I think that to begin a caption on a page without an image would confuse more people than it would help.
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Which is why I talked about "block elements" in my original question. If an image has an associated caption, don't float the image; wrap the image and caption in a div and float the div.
In general I'm looking for something like pdurrant proposes. Jane reads at font size 1, and there's room for the element to fit on the page; Joe reads at size 8, so there isn't room for the element on the current page, and it gets shelved temporarily by the renderer until the top of the next page (ok, no "pages"; screen, display, boojum, whatever) and then displayed.
Hitch is worrying about pathological cases, but try blowing up the font size to huge on just about any webpage and you get these sort of problems. Most people never do this so don't find out the problems. Example: a couple of quite long paras with an image floated left of the top of para 1, and an image floated right at the top of para 2. Now reduce the font size so that the paras are shorter than the images (or widen the page) and it looks horrible. This is a problem for the book designer/compositor; he/she has to do things in a way that will make sense in the majority of cases. Just as there are well-designed websites that work well for most people, and others that are badly-designed and look horrible to most people.
In this case it seems we just don't have the tools available to even try to make it look nice, so it seems we just have to shut up and put up with books that look horrible in all cases, not just the pathological ones.