Thread: Kobo Bug thread
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Old 02-28-2017, 06:05 AM   #838
Rev. Bob
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Device: Kobo H2O, iPad mini 3, Kindle Touch
Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB View Post
The 8th stylesheet which had the !importants was used to try to cover the sins of commision and omission in the other 7 -- lipstick on a pig.
That's typically been my experience, that !important is used as a crude patch by people who can't or won't take the time to go back and do it right.

Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf View Post
That is very excessive. I've never seen 8 CSS in one eBook.
Usually, when I see something like that, it's for an omnibus that was literally made by taking the existing ebooks and shoveling them together into one file. I was dealing with that a little while back, when there were four books in a series and the publisher had made a 4-in-1 package out of 'em.

Tor.com's "Some of the Best of" anthologies do the same thing, and I've seen some indie short story collections where the author published the stories separately at first, then rolled 'em up into a bigger book. So I can see how it can come to pass as a quick and dirty solution. (Pretty quick, but very dirty.) This is why I like the "house stylesheet" approach that some of the Big Five take, although it'd be nice if they'd take the step of weeding out the unused rules before distribution. At least it makes combined books easier to put together, I guess.

Anyway, it's not too hard to unravel if you're careful about it, but you do have to watch out for class names that are reused between CSS sheets but change meanings along the way. For example, calibre2 might be "standard body text" in one book but "chapter title text" in another. I usually respond to that in an omnibus by splitting the books into new ebooks, renaming the classes (such as by putting a "bk1_" at the beginning), then recombining them. Once that disambiguation's done, it's usually easy to merge the stylesheets and combine the classes that do the same things. I think calibre has a merge function now that may make that easier, but I haven't tried it out yet.

Frankly, I wish there were some kind of standards for ebook styling. The web tech has general expectations and ebook readers have default values; that shouldn't be a big ask. I'm not even talking about the picky stuff, just "set your body text to 'medium' instead of 'small' or some weird percentage" for a start.
Last edited by Rev. Bob; 02-28-2017 at 06:06 AM. Reason: Missed a "not"!
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