[Hitch]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

In print the publisher can look at where the scene break falls on the page and add an asterism, dropcap or some other visible indicator if it woud be ambiguous without it. Can't do that with an ebook, so the only way to be sure is to always add a visible indicator of the break and never rely just on adding margin to the top of the new scene.

Yes, they can, (more below) but oftentimes do not. I've encountered it recently in several novels I've read. And, no, they weren't self-pubbed cheapies; they were big books. The publisher relied on the reader's good sense to know that they'd scene-shifted, simply because the last line of prose ended a few letters (literally) before the top of the next page.

In fact, the reason I know that we see this a lot is because we do a fair amount of work from scanned material (backlist, etc.). We are constantly having to review the printed page, so to speak, for this very reason--ABBYY could not, as does a person, detect a scene shift, because the page was laid out just as described--the last line of the preceding paragraph was long enough to "fool" Abbyy that the next line, flush-left, top of the next page, was a continuation of that para, not a new one.

What you're thinking about is really not quite the same. Publishers do NOT want fleurons to appear at the top of any given page as the first element after the running head, because it looks funky. If the prior page is just long enough to go squared, they'll simply flush-left the next para. Because the other option is you have to delete/lose TWO lines, at least, usually 3; you need the last line to end pretty much not less than 3 lines from the last line of the page, to squeeze in a fleuron, and even that is too tight. So, you would lead/kern heavily, and shoot for it, but that is a LOT of writing to lose. You then end up asking the author (or publisher's editor) to nuke and rewrite 3-4 lines of text--now, mind you, this is JUST for typography. Roughly 240-300 characters. 99 times out of 100, for this precise scenario, the publisher chooses to trust the reader to understand that a scene break has occurred, by using the basic flush-left convention. Because, to them and to convention, a fleuron at the top of the page is just ghastly.

When we have our print clients review their advance copies, I request that they look for this exact thing, so that they and we can catch it and deal with it, IF they choose (most do not, mind you).

Originally Posted by Notjohn

Someone might think it was the same paragraph, continuing from the previous page? That would be remote indeed, and I doubt it would apply to any experienced reader. (And what other kind of reader would a writer want?)

Not as remote as you think, see above. It actually happens fairly often. We have a book in right now with a boatload of scene-breaks, shifts, and we've had to redesign chunks of it for this reason.

Just as poets have this mad notion that they should DESIGN the page in addition to writing the poem, writers think they should use weird fonts for some obscure reasons of their own. <snip for brevity>... has ever paid the slightest attention to my chosen font.

So it is with prose. The reader can figure it out. Readers aren't stupid, or they wouldn't be reading our books. That was true in 1965 when that novel was published, and it's even truer today, when the stupid people are all watching streaming video.

We have a book in right this second, that we're doing for print/eBook, and oish, is this one like that. The client has a telepathic character, and so thus we have regular body fonts, heading fonts, and a very foofy font for the telepathic transmissions of the protagonist. I've endeavored to try to not use the foofy font (yes, kiddles,it's....Papyrus!), but the alternatives s/he has asked for are worse. Papyrus also does not work at Amazon's KDP; nor do most of its quasi-clones, although (she said, sadly), we do have an OS font that does work rather well that's similar enough that we use the Pap in print and the replacement in eBooks.

Poetry? No reasoning with those folks. Just invested a 1+ hour phone call with a very nice lady who wanted to do her work (poetry/bible verses) in FXL, because she couldn't stand to have the couplets/stanzas, etc., BREAK across page/screens. I 'splained, that folks who read on e-reading devices are perfectly accustomed to this phenomena. I told her, hey, you want FXL, we'll do it for you, but I recommend against it, and yadda-yadda is why. Sadly, haven't heard back from her. That's what I get for being truthful with folks. ;-)

Hitch