[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

The impression I've gotten of CSS is that it makes even the simplest formatting very complicated, especially if you include a great deal of formatting (which I've found in my experience with styles in word processing which often becomes a bit of work to get my documents formatted correctly). Part of the reason for that impression is that it seems that CSS wasn't been properly implemented in some web browsers and didn't work as it should have (although that is likely no longer the case).

Well...if you use the Styles pane/option in your Word processor consistently, and correctly, you really ought not to have issues when the book is being formatted as a book, unless what you've done isn't "doable" in eBooks--which happens. For example, we get a lot of chapter heads in which a client has used a "text effect" from Word, like 3-D or what-have-you. We don't have the capability to put that particular CSS into a MOBI for Kindle. Or text floating over an image; again, if you have to deal with the less-advanced Amazon devices, you can't do that, not AS text-floating-over-an-image. Other than that, it really ought not be difficult.

But I must admit that the code you included above is very simple indeed, and if all CSS coding is that easy then it should be the way to go...as long as it works consistently. I wonder if an option could be offered in ereaders where you make a CSS in your ereader and all ebooks are formatted in accordance with that CSS, overriding any CSS elements in the ebook itself.

Basically, all good CSS looks like that. There are scads of crap CSS that is put out by word-processors with "one-button" export--Word, OO, LO, Scrivener, PAGES (OM*G, Pages' output is just horrid); and of course layout programs like INDD can output some horrific CSS if it's being used by a newb. I've seen things like, "char-span-override-301," in which 301 is the incremental number of the character style overrides. Now, that's bad.

What word processor or...? are you using, when you are styling your book?

Vis-a-vis overrides: I can tell you that this is a massive headache for folks like me. For example, consider the Drop cap, which isn't hard to do in print. It's not hard to do if you have sufficient control in eBooks. But it's heavily dependent upon you having control over the font, and the vertical height of the element (or drop) and the line-height. The MOMENT that a reader puts that book into a software reader that allows them to override any of that, even merely the font, the (appearance of the) book goes to hell.

So, I don't object to the idea in principle, at all, but I surely do in practice. If eReaders would all allow media-queries, that could respond to that type of overriding, that would be great; but on the other hand, nobody could EVER figure out, in advance, all the possible permutations of the possible overrides, so...I'm blowing smoke out of my keister.

<rant on...>

And really, it's kind of...wish-list-y. After all, it's not like folks are running around making changes to their print books, are they? This is akin to the obsession with reporting typos in books now and expecting them to be fixed damn skippy--an idea that didn't even EXIST even 10 years ago. It would be a cold day in hell before some reader would send Random House an email or letter saying "oh, I found this typo in print Book X," and actually expect Random House to REISSUE the damn book, fixing the typo. But now? Now they expect authors and publishers to "hop to." I think it's outrageous behavior, myself.

In a way, while some of it is people being genuinely helpful, a larger part of it is people showing off what they perceive as their superior knowledge, and expecting the publisher to jump on it, to acknowledge how valuable their contribution was, by fixing it immediately. It's a form of self-validation and self/instant gratification.

Don't say it isn't--I, for one, have seen far too many of their love notes to Amazon, sending in, for example, two typos--one a Brit spelling, mind you, so not a typo--in a 250K word (yes, two hundred and fifty thousand words) novel that was previously trade-pubbed. That's not helpful--that's being insufferably precious.

</rant off>


Hitch